


In or Out

by pigeon_hawk



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Boys Kissing, Deviates From Canon, Fluff and Smut, Friendship, M/M, Oral Sex, Polyjuice Potion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-09 08:16:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16446170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeon_hawk/pseuds/pigeon_hawk
Summary: He had always sort of fantasized about seeing Malfoy like this: defenseless, defeated, face pressed hard into the mud and crying out for mercy; but this was just disappointing. Something had finally wiped that smug grin off his face, and Harry hadn’t even been allowed to watch it happen. It felt… ugh.Wrong. Malfoy wasdoing it wrong.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fanfic I've written, so any suggestions/corrections are welcome! I'm just wandering around in the dark here. Trying not to run into the furniture.

 

When Harry found him crying in the bathroom he looked disturbingly like a kitten caught in a windstorm - eyes red, shirt slightly damp from the steam rising up out of the enormous Greek baths, hair wild and disheveled. He had always sort of fantasized about seeing Malfoy like this: defenseless, defeated, face pressed hard into the mud and crying out for mercy; but this was just disappointing. Something had finally wiped that smug grin off his face, and Harry hadn’t even been allowed to watch it happen. It felt… ugh. _Wrong_. Malfoy was _doing it wrong_.

“What the hell are you doing in here?” he began; and then immediately regretted it.

Malfoy’s head snapped up, disgust written all over his splotchy red face. He was shaking. "For fuck's sake, Potter, is there not some other corner of this enormous castle to which you might, potentially, fuck off?” He looked Harry up and down with disdain, bristling and humiliated, his nose dripping fluids onto his already wet knees. Even his voice was wrong - cracked and helpless and much too _young-_ sounding, and Harry suddenly noticed a package of pink ladies' razors sitting open on the edge of the sink. Surely he hadn't come up here to- to-

Shit, shit, shit. They were going to have to talk about feelings now, he just knew it! And Harry was going to make things worse. "Malfoy, you _idiot_ -" and then stopped abruptly, startled by the ferocity of his own voice. There was probably a right way to talk to people when they were in this sort of - state. "Merlin, Malfoy, you can't possibly - you're not even - I don't even know what to-"  
  
A smirk played at the corner of the boy's mouth. "Oh _well_ done, Potter, _that’s_ something for me to think about, isn’t it? Now please do show yourself the fuck out before I turn you into a bloody goldfish and flush you down the toilet.” Malfoy somehow managed to be pompous and infuriating in spite of what sounded like quite a large quantity of mucous clogging up his nasal passages.

Harry wanted to be angry with him, he _really_ did, but he wasn’t sure he could pull it off when Malfoy looked like… that. He took a deep breath. It was well past curfew - not the best time to stage an intervention _or_ get in a fist fight, which was all the options that came to mind.

"Look, I'm.” _Ugh._ “Sorry," said Harry, letting his shoulders droop. He was _too tired_ for this. When he’d seen Malfoy's little dot wandering around the Marauders’ Map in the middle of the night, he'd imagined him doing something nefarious. Now, looking around at the cavernous room, he felt like he'd intruded on something private. Huge candelabras had been erected at the four corners of the bathroom, casting everything in a soft yellow light that flickered off of wet surfaces and full-length mirrors. The faucets dripped, each one in a slightly different tone. It sounded a little like someone trying to pick out a tune on a xylophone.

Harry swallowed. _Just don't be an arsehole,_ he told himself uselessly. "Malfoy, just tell me if you - came here to hurt yourself. Because I'm... here? For you?" Malfoy stared at him blankly, eyes wide, as though Harry had bees coming out of his mouth instead of words. Then something seemed to occur to him, and he turned to look at the pack of razors. A strangled, embarrassed sort of sound escaped his lips. " _No_ ," he said after a moment. "Idiot. Though I suppose that’s a more rational course of action than what I actually had in mind when I bought them. At any rate they're useless. Muggle things always are.” He dropped his face onto his knees again, hugging himself.

Harry felt oddly like he had falling off his broomstick in third year and getting the wind knocked out of him. His stomach kept clenching and unclenching over and over so he couldn’t catch his breath, the reality of all that _height_ and _velocity_ and _gravity_ hitting him at once so that he felt his whole body shaking, inside and out, like a bell that'd been struck. Malfoy's thin frame curled protectively around the itself. He looked as though some vital part of him had been wrenched out through his stomach, and for some incomprehensible reason Harry worried that he might be dying. It was so unlike Malfoy’s usually brash, self-satisfied posture, so tired and diminished and un-self conscious, that Harry forgot who Malfoy _was_ long enough to feel sorry for him. Was that all this was? This bizarre rush of emotion toward someone he had hated so thoroughly for so many years? He wanted to make Malfoy a cup of tea and wrap him up in blankets and tell him that everything would be all right.

"Well that's - good. I suppose," Harry said. He hugged himself for a moment just as Malfoy was doing. He was supremely uncomfortable. Harry was, in his own estimation, the worst possible person to deal with something like this - but he summoned all the compassion he could manage, and thrust it awkwardly at the other boy as a peace offering. "Malfoy, look, I just - look, I’m sorry. Can you, _please_ , just look at me for one second tell me what's going on? I know you're in trouble, and I know you've been working on something in secret - something you shouldn't. But whatever it is, you don't have to deal with… this sort of thing… alone."  
  
Malfoy looked at him patiently, like he was _dithering_ , the fucker. “Did you just say _please_? I must look awful if I’ve inspired civility in the likes of _you_.” He wiped his face on his sleeve and looked horrified when it came away sticky and wet.  He sat up a little straighter, throwing back his shoulders.  "And no, you can’t help me you… fucking… irredeemable halfwit. It's a wonder you manage to put on your own shoes every morning, or does Granger do that for you as well? Just go away." He waved his hand dismissively, as though he had only to order Harry out of a room and Harry would make it so. He was shaking with the strain of holding himself together, and Harry wanted to be annoyed with him - wanted to go back to their familiar pattern of trading insults and occasional hexes, but at that moment he just felt worried and _sad_ and weirdly sympathetic. And then, without really thinking about it, something he’d heard around school or somewhere, came back to him. It was stupid, of course, it was always stupid to pay attention to gossip and he knew it was probably nothing and he hated himself for asking, but -

  
"Malfoy…” said Harry, and Malfoy gave him a look like Harry was the sort of thing that you scraped off your shoes before going inside. “How - how’s your mum?"  
  
In response, Malfoy buried his face in his arms and let out a quiet little sob. He mumbled something unintelligible and blew his nose in a horrible fashion, and it was all so tremendously embarrassing that Harry didn’t know where to look. 

  
"Sorry? I sort of missed that."  
  
Malfoy's eyes snapped up to glare at him once again, murderous and rimmed with angry red.  "I said _he is going to kill my mother_. He's going to kill her because I can't do the fucking thing."

  
With an unpleasant jolt Harry remembered where he had heard about Malfoy's mother. _Not_ gossip. Not something that had been going around the school. It was, in fact, something he had overheard during one of his dreams. Someone had been casually torturing a Muggle, and he had heard Narcissa’s name mentioned with what Harry now realized was probably anticipation.  It had been a particularly unpleasant dream.  
  
Harry swallowed. He thought about how miserable Malfoy had been all this year.  Harry had been almost worried about him all year, in a detached sort of way - “obsessed” his friends would have said ( _had_ been saying, with increasing concern for Harry's mental health), but Harry had always trusted his instincts and this ought to be no different.  He had been quietly keeping track of Malfoy’s eating habits ( _dreadful_ ), asking his friends about him ( _not in a weird way_ , _he assured himself)_ , checking on his little dot on the Marauders’ map at all hours of the night and day ( _especially when he couldn’t sleep or when he was having a bath, or when he’d had a hard day and was feeling a bit lonely_ ), and he had known that something was wrong. Where were Malfoy's friends? Why weren't _they_ here to pick him up off the floor and save his sorry arse?

Mothers would be Harry's undoing. He sighed, afraid to ask the question. “What have they done to her?”

 

Malfoy told him.

  
"Christ. Are you sure?"  
  
Malfoy's shoulders stiffened, but he didn't look up. He gave a slow nod, his eyes fixed on the opposite wall, and Harry found that it was impossible not to believe him.  
  
"Shit."  
  
They _would_ use his mother, of course they would use her - that was the sort of thing they did.  Malfoy might be a malicious, self-aggrandizing, spineless little toad, but he loved his horrible parents and missed them when they were away, and now someone was using that affection as a crowbar to either pry him open or beat him into submission. Whatever he was up to now, whoever he’d been taking orders from, they had found it necessary to apply force.  
  
Something fluttered in his chest, warm and protective and vaguely unsettling.  “Listen," said Harry after a long, uncomfortable silence. "He's not."  
  
Malfoy looked at him, puffy-eyed and annoyed and uncomprehending.  
  
"He's not going to touch her, Malfoy.  We're going to get her out."

 

 

*******

"I knew it, I fucking knew it!" Harry growled with satisfaction, dropping back down to lay face-up on the blue-tiled floor. It would have been an exaggeration to say that he was in the throes of ecstasy at that moment. It would have been a _very_ _slight_ exaggeration.  
  
Harry's voice had calmed down, but his eyes were still fixed on Malfoy's forearm, where he had pulled back a sleeve to reveal his horrible tattoo. Malfoy had been concealing the Dark Mark all year. Harry couldn't stop staring at it, anger welling up in his chest, and he wanted to slap Malfoy for throwing his lot in with murderers and bigots; but Malfoy could hardly bear to look at it at all. His lip curled aggressively when his fingers brushed over the thing, shaking the sleeve back down into place.

He spoke very softly. "Sometimes I wonder if I could just cut it off." Harry didn't know what to say to that.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Potter, I'm not going to _do_ it. I couldn't even bring myself to shave my head."

Harry stared at him in horror. "Ugh - Malfoy, that's - that's disgusting, is what it is. You with a shaved head? And why would you try to do something like that with a woman's razor from Tesco, anyway? Those things are useless."

Malfoy scowled at him "Yes, yes," he said techily, "I know that now. I thought if I did it by magic, it might end up being permanent - cosmetic spells are notoriously delicate, and my hair has always been a bit unruly - not like yours," he said, giving Harry a pointed look, "yours is like a traffic collision, but my hair has _moods_ , is what I'm saying. And I thought, if I didn't like it, I could just - make it grow back."

Harry couldn't help but snort when he heard the phrase "My hair hais moods". Of course it did. Everything about Malfoy had to be so dramatic. "I _knew_ you were up to something," he said, feeling smug.  
  
Malfoy scoffed, rolling down his sleeve.  "There is something wrong with you, Potter. And in any case, of _course_ you knew something was going on, you only follow me around every second of every day like a chaperone. I have no doubt that there is a chart somewhere on your person right now detailing my bowel movements. My mother should thank you for safeguarding my virginity."  
  
Harry rolled his eyes at him and smiled. It felt strange to talk to Malfoy like a real person; to laugh with him and answer his insults without an audience watching them. So many of their interactions had taken place in front of other people, and it occurred to him for the first time that one or both of them might have been putting on a bit of a show. It made his stomach sort of hurt, because he would have sworn he wasn’t like that, but now he wondered. "I think we both know your virginity was never in any real danger.”

Malfoy glowered at him. “Speak for yourself, mop-head. I'll have you know I've been propositioned three times." He looked at Harry archly, and added, "well - nearly three.”

Harry's mouth turned up at the corners as he tried and failed to look impressed at this. “Ah. Well. To've been _nearly_ propositioned at all… that's pretty clever of you.”

“It was this French girl who was visiting England for the summer with her parents. She was sort of chatting me up - I'm fairly certain about that, although my French is better now than it was back then, and there was a… tie, involved. It was at a party my parents threw when I was thirteen, and it was all extremely illicit, but apparently wine makes me drowsy.” He said this with his nose in the air.  
  
Harry swallowed down a laugh and tried to look serious. "Poor girl. Disappointed like that. I hope she at least got to see you in your pyjamas?”

“I would have been,” sniffed Malfoy, “an extraordinarily good catch.”

Harry raised his eyebrows and made a show of looking Malfoy up and down as if to verify this claim. He’d meant it as a joke. But as his eyes slid over Malfoy’s surprisingly strong shoulders and narrow waist, his neatly-pressed trousers sticking to him from the humidity, his mouth warm and pink-looking, Harry felt his cheeks getting warm. Well - the girl had reasonably good taste, he supposed. He might have found Malfoy attractive, too, if he couldn't understand a word that came out of his mouth. Malfoy seemed suddenly to notice that Harry was staring at him for longer than he should have been, tilting his head slightly to the side as if to ask a question. Harry coughed and looked pointedly away.

“And what, may I ask, do _you_ stand to gain from this arrangement?” Malfoy asked, anxiety creeping into his voice. “I can’t give you money, you realize. Father’s more or less cut me off. I don’t have any social or political standing at this point either. I just want my mother back. What do _you_ want?”

  
"Well, I mean… what have you got?" Harry said off-handedly, hoping to get the sudden awkwardness behind them, but if anything Malfoy looked more uncomfortable.  
  
Harry didn’t want anything, really. And he couldn't just come out and say that, actually, he hated seeing Malfoy like this, all his pride and defiance dribbling out into a puddle on the floor, and would have done almost anything to put things the right way round again. Harry considered the awful possibility that he actually preferred Malfoy the other way - vain and spiteful and dangerous - because what would that say about _Harry_? Something to bottle up and push down as deep as possible into his subconscious until he had some time to sort it out. Or never. Never would be fine as well.  
  
"I realize I'm not in any position to negotiate." Malfoy ran one hand over his face, looking humiliated and overwhelmed, and hugged his knees to himself again. "If you mean to… if certain things are expected of me..." there was an angry blush creeping up the back of his neck as he hugged himself tightly. "I'd just like to know in advance, is all."  
  
Harry shook his head, confused. "Malfoy, you've pretty well come over to the other side now whether you like it or not. But you don’t have to… to _pay_ people to do the right thing. Anybody as slimy and disgustingly charming as you are should be able to find a way to make himself useful wherever you go. You'll still be an unbelievable arsehole, but there's nothing either of us can do about that."  
  
Malfoy's mouth dropped open slightly, a little wrinkle appearing between his eyebrows. "It is extremely disturbing to hear you refer to me as _charming_.”  
  
“Oh, shut up, will you?” said Harry. “And look, I mean - you're obviously pants at dark wizarding anyway, so you may as well give it up. You should feel lucky that anyone will have you."

"That's fair. I am absolutely shit at doing evil," Malfoy confessed with something bordering on pleasure, stretching his long legs against the cold floor and arching his back. They'd been sitting here for too long.  
  
"You are fucking terrible at it," Harry agreed with a short burst of laughter.  
  
Malfoy looked Harry up and down and waved his hand at him with evident disgust. "That’s what’s wrong with your side - no standards at all. You people will take anybody."

"Yeah, well," Harry agreed, grinning. "We should both be grateful for it." And then he froze again. "We have to tell Dumbledore," he said. "He'll know how to get your mum out safely."

Malfoy looked uncertain.

"We can't just march in there alone and grab her, Malfoy. Don't be an idiot. We can talk to him in the morning."

Malfoy looked like he wanted to argue, but instead he pressed his lips into a thin line and took a long, slow breath through his nose. "Fine. I can see how that might be... sensible, under the circumstances. But if you could refrain from mentioning - well." He put a hand over the place where Harry knew his mark was hidden. Malfoy's gaze dropped to the floor and stayed there. He was doing that thing again where he looked about twelve, and Harry went all soft inside.

"Er, yeah - all right," said Harry. "Don't think of it."

When they split up and went to their rooms, Harry couldn't sleep. He wondered what he would say to Malfoy when he saw him again. He worried what people would think if they saw the two of them together - nothing good, he decided. It seemed unnatural - _was_ unnatural. But he had gotten himself into this situation, and he wasn't going to back out just because it was weird or dangerous or ill-advised. He liked a little danger in his life.

 

*******

The next morning at breakfast, Harry felt like he was slogging through the mud. He sat down heavily, rubbed his face with the palm of his hand, and groaned. Almost immediately a cup of tea appeared next to his plate, double-brewed, with just the right amount of sugar. Thank God for magic. 

High above the tables, the charmed ceiling showed a scene that was almost white. Thick, pale grey clouds were clogging up the sky, so many that they formed an enormous sheet too wide and thick for sunlight to penetrate. At the entrance to the Great Hall, just where students were entering, there was a hint of ragged charcoal grey - as though a storm were right there on the threshold, just out of sight, waiting to crash down on their heads.

"Oy!" said Ron, dropping onto the chair to his left and immediately grabbing a sausage from the table with his fingers and stuffing it into his mouth. "Where were you last night?" he inquired through bits of meat. "You were gone for ages!" He picked up a fork and managed to get three more sausages in his mouth before Harry had time to think of a response. Harry gulped at his tea, scalding the roof of his mouth in the process, and tried to think of an answer. "Been having nightmares again, have you?"

Right. Better than having to think of an excuse on his own. "Yeah," he said blearily, "couldn't stay asleep, so I got up and did some reading."

Ron's mouth twisted up. "Not that chapter Binns gave us on Goblin marriage customs? That's worse than nightmares, that is. What sort of species needs to kill that many small animals for a wedding ceremony?” Ron snorted inelegantly and drank his entire glass of pumpkin juice in one go. “Reading entrails. It's enough to put you off your dinner.” He shoveled an enormous forkful of eggs into his maw and chewed enthusiastically. Harry found it impossible to look away.

"I figured I could just use Hermione's notes and skip the reading," Harry replied. Ron grunted at this, but said nothing. Ron and Hermione were not on speaking terms this week. They had always argued and bickered, but it had gotten so much worse lately and it was sort of hard to watch. Ever since Ron and Lavendar had started “officially” going out, Hermione had put Ron under the full silent treatment. Worst of all, Harry sometimes thought that he deserved it. "Anyway, I'll be all right," said Harry, casting about for a piece of bread to butter. He had tried talking to Ron about Hermione (and vise versa) enough times to know that it was useless to try to intervene. Neither of them had ever been very sensible when it came to the other. Still, it made it awkward for Harry that he couldn't spend time with his two best friends in the same room.

Harry didn't know what to say. All around him, quiet conversations were starting to buzz and bubble. He turned toward the entrance, seeing that the dark stain of storm clouds had crept further into the room, still hovering over the threshold but now twisting and changing aggressively as the wind raged. Just then, Malfoy walked through the door looking infuriatingly refreshed and cheerful.

His perfect hair was just stupid, for one thing. The red around his eyes had disappeared, and he was smirking and chatting as he took his seat at the Slytherin table, serving himself a healthy portion of eggs on toast. And then for just a fraction of a second, he looked up and met Harry's eyes. Something warm washed over Harry, as though he'd stepped into a hot shower on an cold morning, and he felt himself tense momentarily before Malfoy looked hurriedly away and poured himself a cup of tea.  And that's when it occurred to him that he and Draco Malfoy had a secret.

There was a droning in Harry’s left ear, and he turned toward it, realizing as he did so that he had no idea what Ron was on about. Quidditch?

…pie?

“Which leaves out all the really usable options, so you’re just left with whatever anybody else didn’t want. But I did get a nice pair of miffkins there when I was a kid.”

No fucking clue.

“So do you want to go next weekend?” Ron pressed, and Harry just nodded, hoping that he looked like someone who'd been paying attention all along.

“Brilliant!” Ron said, smiling as he took a pancake in his hand, slathered it with gooseberry jam and swallowed it whole. “I'll let Dad know. Don't forget your boots,” he said, winking at Harry like this was a joke he ought to understand, and got up from the table with three more pancakes in hand.

Harry couldn't tell his friends about what happened last light. He had always told them everything, but it wasn't his secret to tell, and he felt strangeley protective of the fragile truce that he and Malfoy had reached. Maybe he could tell them eventually, but not until he was sure that he knew what was going on himself. Part of him wanted to pull Ron into a room somewhere and confess everything, but what would he even say? “Hey," said Ron, "I'll meet you in class, right? I have somewhere to be.” He raised his eyebrows in a way that was almost definitely meant to be suggestive, and Harry grimaced, hoping that Ron would spare him any embarrassing details.

“Sure. Great,” said Harry, and got back to his toast, feeling unsettled in a number of different ways. After breakfast he would talk to Dumbledore. They would sort it all out.

 

*******

Dumbledore seemed rather pleased when they walked in his door, as though he had guessed a secret but hadn't wanted to want to spoil it for anyone else. They were in different classes at the start of the day, but they had both slagged off by pretending to be ill (great thanks to Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes for their line of ready-made flu symptoms), and arrived at the Headmaster's office ten minutes apart. Malfoy still looked a little green around the gills. 

Dumbledore arranged for Malfoy to serve detention with Professor Flitwick every night for the next two weeks, during which time a variety of people debriefed Malfoy regarding his time at the Manor - looking for information that would lead to his mother's freedom, as well as anything else that the resistance could use to weaken Voldemort's grip on his followers and the Ministry. And Malfoy turned out to be a wealth of information - helpful, intuitive about people, with an extraordinary memory for names and subtle rivalries that could be exploited to encourage infighting. Dumbledore said at the outset that there was no reason for Harry to have anything to do with these discussions - some of the descriptions were rather disturbing, and he thought it would be like putting him through his worst nightmares with Voldemort over and over again without ever being able to respond in a constructive way.  Harry felt both irritated and touched that the older wizard wanted to spare him.  
  
But the boys insisted on having Harry present during every de-briefing. Much to Harry's surprise, Malfoy demanded this concession even more adamantly than he did, almost to the point of pleading. He still scowled at Harry all the time they were together, still took every opportunity to take the piss out of him during their lessons (though Harry sometimes thought he caught a glance that was altogether warmer and friendlier than they would have shared a month before), but between the hours of 8:30 and 9:15 p.m. each night they sat side by side in a strange sort of solidarity as Malfoy slowly unraveled the weeks and months he had spent living under the same roof as Voldemort.   
  
Harry learned a great many things that he had never wanted to know: specific methods and devices involved in the practice of magical torture; the sexual fetishes of several prominent Death Eaters, which apparently had been on display in public areas of the Manor; practical applications of ritualistic dark magic; the names and physical descriptions and revolting appetites of Fenrir Greyback's werewolf pack.  Malfoy answered every question in a kind of detached, anxious monotone, but Harry understood from the way the other boy's voice would catch or his hands would shake under the table that he had spent his summer holidays in a state of constant panic. He had patiently warded the shit out of his room every night for three months, only to lie awake in bed thinking about better ways to die than at the hands of a psychopath. Malfoy had no illusions anymore about the nobility of his father's cause - that much was clear. And as much as Harry hated him, he realized how powerless he must have felt living in that house. His parents had found a monster and brought it inside.  
  
Harry asked him, after that first night, why Malfoy wanted _him_ of all people to act as a witness to all these horrible confessions (because that was definitely what Harry was there for). It felt almost painfully private; like watching someone sleep, or thumbing through a stack of their love letters, or re-living their memories with the help of a pensieve.  
  
Malfoy swallowed thickly, his expression grim. "I suppose I… I trust you," he confessed - sounding embarrassed and disgusted with himself in spite of the way his shoulders seemed to relax. "I don't trust _them_."

 

*******

A few of Harry's professors seemed to notice that something was wrong. They asked how he was doing or tried to tell him not to worry, but nobody, either in the Order or out, told Harry and Malfoy anything they didn't already know. It was infuriating. Professor Flitwick insisted that a plan was quickly coming together to get Narcissa Malfoy out of harm's way, but he claimed that knowing the details of the operation would only put them both at risk. What he didn’t say was that all of them still suspected Malfoy might be playing a game: pretending to switch sides in order to obtain useful information on his father's behalf. He also seemed worried that Harry, in spite of his (admittedly unsuccessful) training in Occlumency might accidentally communicate some name or important detail to the enemy.  The less either of them knew, the better.

"There are very capable wizards and witches handling this, now, boys," he told them with a frown. "It's too much to put on your young shoulders. You're doing your part already. Leave the rest to _us_." He glanced at the circles under Harry's eyes, ugly and now as dark as bruises, and frowned. "And for heaven's sake, do try to get some sleep."  
  
After they'd been told nothing except “hurry along to bed” for three nights in a row, they were both seething. They resented being treated as if they were helpless first years when both of them had been up to their necks in Dark wizards (in wildly different circumstances, yes, but _still_ ), and survived. Malfoy's mother was the one in danger, after all - he had a right to know things. And hadn’t Harry proved himself capable, again and again? Why was it never enough to earn him any respect from the other members of the Order?

And so on the third night, in a move that was not the least bit childish or contrary, they decided to fuck off to the kitchens for an hour and eat sweets instead of going to bed. This was when Harry discovered that Malfoy could be quite funny under the right circumstances - and that he could be persuaded to do almost anything if cake was involved.  
  
This became their new routine. They would part ways just outside Professor Flitwick's office and pretend to go to their own dormitories, only to meet up at a predetermined location 15 minutes later where they could complain and worry and eat chocolate frogs or whatever sweets they had got their hands on that day.  
  
They did have to be careful about being seen together. Malfoy didn’t want it to get back to his father that he had abandoned his mission, so he continued to socialize with the same people and disappear at the same times of day. Harry was annoyed with him for being able to play his part so perfectly, but occasionally he would catch the other boy's eye across a crowded room and see the fear again.

The prefects' bathroom was still a decent spot to meet secretly in late at night, as was the alcove on the third floor.  Stairs and walkways had been sort of… rerouted… away from the alcove after somebody transfigured the knights' gauntlets into an astonishing variety of rude gestures - some of which Harry had never seen or heard about before.  It was quite educational, in a way.  The armor started to shriek when anyone touched the knights or tried to transfigure them back, so McGonnogall had written it off as a project for the summer holiday.  
  
Harry had never expected the two of them to get along.  At first they just complained about the teachers and insulted one another conversationally - nothing too personal, except that sometimes the conversation shifted and then all of a sudden it became _horribly personal_ and there was nothing Harry could do to steer them back to safe waters. They would fight. And it was fine, because this was about right and wrong, about saving someone's mother from the clutches of a vicious murderer, and it shouldn't matter if that someone was an arsehole, which Malfoy absolutely was.

“When I was five,” said Malfoy one night when they were looking up at the stars through a high window above the third floor alcove, “I used to have these elaborate tea parties in my room.” Harry tried to imagine it, smiling at the thought of that tiny blonde terror fiddling with lace doilies and spoons and tablecloths. “I would make up invitations with my colored pencils and insist that the house elves deliver them for me - they would go all around the house, handing them out to people and toys and imaginary dragons. But in the end it would usually be just Mother and me and a couple of stuffed giraffes, and she would always dress up for it like it was a real outing. She would wear her best hat and gloves, and talk to me like a grown-up, and she would let me eat all the biscuits by myself.”

Malfoy's love for his mother tugged at something in Harry - something warm and private, tangled up with a longing for a home and a family he would never get enjoy. It made Malfoy seem practically human. It had taken them almost six years of school to move from being enemies to barely-tolerated acquaintances, and now, without meaning to, they were sliding into something worryingly like friendship.

"I am imagining you in little pyjamas with the feet on," Harry admitted, and Malfoy laughed. It was a good sound. Harry thought he'd like to hear it again.

  
"I suppose they might have simply taken her wand," he said, returning to an earlier part of the conversation. Malfoy hadn't seen his mother in two months. She continued to write him letters, but the contents had become uncharacteristically cold and nondescript.  The handwriting was clearly hers, the tone was nearly right, but something important was missing from them - some vital spark.  “How do you know for sure if someone is under the Imperius curse?”

Harry thought about this. “We should ask Hermione,” he said, feeling suddenly guilty. He hadn’t told his friends anything about what he and Malfoy were doing. _He_ didn’t really know what they were doing, only that it felt new and tentative, and oddly private, and every time he imagined saying anything to Ron it ended with the whole thing being smashed to pieces in a grand and horrible row. Were He and Malfoy friends, too, now? It might not even be safe for Malfoy at the school once his mother escaped and the Death Eaters realized their youngest member had betrayed them. He didn’t know what was going on, but he promised himself that when he figured it out, his friends would be the first to know.

“Maybe,” said Malfoy, but he sounded pained at the suggestion and the subject was therefore dropped. He was always got a bit funny when Harry mentioned his friends.

“It's possible that they’re just keeping her in line with threats, but Imperius makes the most sense. Everything I've seen and heard so far seems to support that line of thinking. They said she hadn’t been doing her hair or her makeup, and staying in her room even for meals. She hasn't been seen in public in weeks."  
  
Malfoy's father wouldn't speak to him about her any longer, and the servants were all too terrified to tell him anything. Malfoy had finally resorted to interrogating one of the house elfs, a scrawny little creature called Widdles, who visited the school once a week to pick up Malfoy's shirts to be ironed (because the Hogwarts elves could hardly be trusted with silk, he told Harry, who scoffed at him and tried to look disgusted). When Malfoy demanded answers to his questions, Widdles hemmed and hawed and almost swallowed his own fist trying to keep the words from spilling out of his mouth, but after Malfoy threatened him with mittens the fragile old thing gave in, terrified, and told him everything.  
  
Apparently his mother had tried to leave the country, disguised as a Muggle. It had happened during a visit to Highbridge on the pretense that she had a rich, ailing cousin she needed to visit and wheedle money out of ( _all for the cause_ , she'd told her husband), but she had failed to return at the appointed time. Now she was being kept in her room under heavy wards, and threats of violence were being thrown around like friendly banter. One of Fenrir Grayback's nameless followers had said in very unambiguous terms that her fate was tied to whether her son, Malfoy, came through on his mission - which involved smuggling a group of Death Eaters into Hogwarts using a vanishing cabinet.  
  
"They won't let me see her," Malfoy said, knees tucked up under his chin, fingers drawing watery shapes across the eggshell blue tiles that made up the floor of the prefects' bathroom. The hair at the nape of his neck had started to curl from the heat and humidity of the room, and he had undone the top three buttons of his expensive-looking white shirt. Probably this was also because of the heat, which was really sort of lovely even though it made both of them a bit drowsy. Harry found that he liked Malfoy better with his tie undone and his hair a bit messy. It was easier to talk to him - or slightly harder, depending on how you looked at it. Harry found himself watching the other boy sometimes when they were like this. - the way he moved his hands and the subtle difference between the smile that meant _you yourself are a moron_ and the one that meant Harry had said something brilliant, usually by accident.

“At first they tried to be subtle about it,” Malfoy explained, flexing long fingers behind his head and stretching his arms so that his perfect button-down shirt, which had come untucked over the course of the evening, rode up just a bit and exposed a narrow strip of skin just over his stomach. Harry made an effort not to stare. “They tried to placate me with flattery or with excuses about why she couldn't be disturbed just then, but two weeks ago when I showed up demanding to see her, one of them gave me this," he said, lifting his shirt up all the way and rolling onto his side to show off a patchwork of angry red slash marks that covered most of his back and right hip. The injuries looked like they were almost healed, but even so -  
  
"Merlin, Malfoy. Don't you know any healing spells? You ought to have Pomfrey take a look at that.”  
  
"Of course I do, unlike _you_ I am an extremely capable wizard - but it's fine. I'm just sort of... letting it heal on its own. I have potions in my room to numb the pain. I think I'm worried that I might forget, or lose my nerve, or something along those lines. It would be easier for me to pretend that everything is fine. But I can’t just leave her there." His expression slackened for just a moment, making him look more helpless and unsure of himself than Harry had ever seen him.  And then he abruptly came to his senses, schooling his features into something cool and unbothered, and yanked his shirt back into place. They didn't talk about it again.


	2. Chapter 2

On Sunday morning, Dumbledore was called away for some sort of emergency. He said he would be gone for two days at the most. The rescue was supposed to happen later that week, though none of the details were shared with the boys. "Better not to risk it," they were told. "The fewer people who know..."  
  
But on Monday everything went straight to hell when Malfoy's house elf, Widdles, nearly beat himself to death with a hot iron in the bathroom of the Slytherin boys' dormitory. He was dirty and winded, and couldn't say what he was doing there. After Malfoy had got the iron off of him and healed the worst of the burns to his hands and face, he found out that his mother was going to be moved out of the house the next morning. No one in the house knew where she was going. It was generally believed that she would not be coming back.  
  
Harry didn't know any of this until Malfoy burst into Harry's morning Potions class smirking and simpering like the king of arseholes. "Professor, I'm sorry for the intrusion, but I'm made to understand that _Potter_ here is wanted in the headmaster's office. Urgently.”  
  
Slughorn frowned at him. "Are you quite sure, my boy? I was under the impression that Professor Dumbledore would not be returning to us until Wednesday afternoon."  
  
Malfoy sniffed, an unpleasant smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "I am terribly sorry, sir. Normally I would never think to interrupt you in this way, but apparently someone from the _Prophet_ is here for an interview with the _fascinating_ and _controversial_ Harry Potter. Fame is such an unruly creature, as you yourself are aware. I'm sure he won't be long.”  
  
Slughorn shooed both of them out immediately, muttering something about material costs and decorum and how he should never have come out of retirement in the first place.  
  
"Well, that was weird. Are you planning to tell me what’s going on?" Harry demanded, trying to match the taller boy's pace as he marched along, angrily yanking open doors. Two minutes later Malfoy found what he was looking for - a broom closet full of cobwebs and cleaning supplies whose charms that had gone slightly off. He grabbed a fistful of Harry's robes and dragged him inside.  
  
"Lumos," Malfoy whispered. And there was light.  
  
Harry realized that his heart was suddenly pounding in his ears. The light settled gently on Malfoy's features, softening the sharp lines of his cheekbones, turning his grey eyes almost to silver like the moon reflected in deep water. Making extended eye contact in such close quarters was probably a bad idea, so instead Harry turned his gaze downward and looked intently at Malfoy's buttons. His perfect, expensive-looking buttons, with a faint opalescent shimmer that made them look as though they were made of pearl. Was that something that they did with men's clothing? Most of Harry's clothes still came from second-hand stores. He entertained a brief image in his head of Malfoy working those buttons open with his fingers, and then snapped his gaze back to eye level with a start. _Buttons_ , his mind said to him, and his body answered back helplessly: _buttons_.

He knew he probably ought to be annoyed with Malfoy for whatever this was, but the strange _thing_ bubbling in his chest felt more like excitement than irritation. Something important was happening - was about to happen. He licked his lips and tried to breathe normally. Was it _in_ , or _out?_   "Malfoy,” he whispered.  
  
"Harry, I need your help. _Please_."  
  
He didn't think Malfoy had ever said _please_ to him before. He had certainly never used Harry's first name. He liked the way it sounded, so posh and dismissive, so he swallowed and dropped his eyes back down to the buttons. _Act normal_ , he told himself uselessly. _Be. Normal_. "Yes, all right, right? I mean, that’s fine, but it's the middle of the day, do you - is this to do with your mother, or.. ?"   
  
Malfoy shut eyes tightly as though he needed to force himself to speak, and for several seconds Harry just stared at the rising and falling of his chest, getting more and more uncomfortable, wondering if he had missed something vitally important over the last several days. He looked up and found himself thinking very seriously about Malfoy's long pale eyelashes and the soft curve of his lips.  He was so close now - his whole body warm and practically humming with carefully controlled energy. It struck Harry with a sudden giddy terror that this might _not_ be about Malfoy's mother.  
  
“She’s being moved first thing tomorrow," Malfoy told him, his voice raw and trembling and tinged with hysteria. "And after that there is nothing that you or I can do for her because I have seen the people they move in the middle of the night, Potter, and I am telling you that they _do not bring their luggage_. I've just had it from the house elf.   It took me ages to get it out of him, nearly an hour _wasted_ already, and when I went to tell Flitwick I heard him talking to Snape of all people. Snape! They've told him _everything_ , Potter, they know everything!"  
  
Harry pressed his lips together, quietly seething.  "They think Snape's on our side."  
  
"He's _not_ on our fucking side!"  
  
"I know that!" Harry paused to collect himself and took a deep breath, noticing that his hands were balled up into fists and his fingernails were digging painfully into the palms of his hands. He made an effort to relax them. The situation was bad, but they could fix it.  "Dumbledore -"  
  
"It's no use! I've been trying to reach him. None of the staff can find him, McGonnogall and I have trying for the last two hours. She wants to help, but it seems he's not been sharing many details with her about their plans either. He thought the fewer people that knew about it the better.”  
  
It should have occurred to Harry right then to tell an adult. Trying to handle something like this on his own was a fundamentally bad idea. Malfoy was suddenly telling him that the plan had to change, and only Harry could help him, and what if Malfoy _was_ actually still working for Voldemort? Something like this had occurred to him early on, but somehow he just couldn't believe it, because - and this was a thought that worried him more than anything - because he thought he _knew_ Malfoy now. Close up, Malfoy had turned out to be exactly as bad as Harry had always thought: just as reckless, resentful, vain and hot headed, only now Harry found that he sort of.. _liked_ those things about him. He was clever and melodramatic and funny, and it made Harry want to laugh and argue with him, and... impress him, he supposed.

Malfoy didn't seem like some irrational force for evil any longer. He had strange taste in music and a weakness for Muggle fantasy novels that he had hidden from his father for years; he made his tea with too much sugar, even for Harry's taste; and when he told a really good story his whole face lit up like it was all happening again, right there in front of him, but better because now he could enjoy it with an audience.  Best of all was the secret and wonderful knowledge that Malfoy was an absolutely useless liar - something Harry had worked out on day two of their arrangement - and this had made it easier to trust him now that their interests were not totally at odds.  Harry had always _paid attention to_ Malfoy - had always noticed him, in the way that one notices a wasp landing on one's face. He'd just never noticed all the noticing. Now he noticed it all the time, and wondered if something might be wrong with him.  
  
And now Malfoy needed his help.  Whatever secret plan had been in place was now obviously worthless, and would have been too late anyway. It was never going to work, and he didn't think they had time to mourn its passing.  "All right then," Harry said finally.  
  
"All right?" Malfoy asked him, his tone crossing the line from furious to incredulous in a heartbeat, "how is any of this _all right_? What am I supposed to do now?" he squeaked, shoving Harry roughly against the wall of the cupboard and sending a couple of brooms and buckets clattering to the floor.  In the silence, his eyes were locked on Harry's, furious, glittering like dark pools in the moonlight. He looked dangerous and desperate, and… sad, Harry supposed.  Harry reached up and grabbed Malfoy tightly by the arm.  
  
"It's all _right_ , is what I'm saying. We'll just… you and I will have to do it ourselves, I suppose."  Malfoy's expression went through a series of changes as he worked through this statement - a small frown drawing his eyebrows down along with it, blinking slowly as he shook his head once, then again, in disbelief.  
  
The wand light suddenly faltered, snuffed out, out as Malfoy's whole body crashed into Harry's with a quiet _thump_. Malfoy hugged him like Harry was a mast in a storm, chest pressed tightly to chest, their bodies flush against one another from their shoulders to their knees. His hair smelled like lemongrass and leather and expensive soap. A few long strands of his hair brushed against Harry's neck, and he fought the inexplicable urge to press in closer to feel the other boy's pulse against his lips. Why had Harry always thought that Malfoy would be cold and sharp around the edges? Harry felt warm all over, and safe, and lit up from inside like a Christmas tree. They were going to be all right.  He'd said it, and he would damn well see to it.  


*******

They had had to involve Hermione, of course.  Malfoy was so worried that he hardly objected at all, and Harry just knew it would have been impossible without her help. She and Harry both had a free hour after Potions, so when she got out of class Harry pulled her aside into an empty classroom and told her everything.  
  
"Oh, Harry! Is _that_ why you two have been sneaking off together in the middle of the night?"  
  
Harry goggled at her.  "How did you know about that?"  
  
She looked uncomfortable. "Well, Ron noticed you were missing, and then the next night we followed you. I'm sorry! We were worried. It's the first time we've talked in weeks, actually."

Harry felt miserable when she said this, and it must have shown on his face.

"Sorry," she said, "just - well, you're not very good at sneaking around, are you?" She didn't look sorry. "But Harry, didn't you ever stop to wonder if this could be part of some larger... plan? I mean honestly, it's _Malfoy_.  How can you possibly trust him? What's he ever done but harass and insult you and everyone we care about?"  
  
This was an extremely good point. Harry knew that it was. He _should_ suspect something, but when he thought about it he just… couldn't. "He's already spent hours and hours giving Dumbledore information about the Death Eaters living in his house. All kinds of useful," _horrifying,_ he thought to himself, "information. Dumbledore said he’d already saved the lives of three witches who were working undercover. They got out just in time! He _is_ an incredible bastard, but…" Harry thought about Malfoy hugging him in the broom cupboard and felt warmth spreading through his chest. "But I think, probably, he's not a murderer. I think when he had to actually live around people like that - see them up close, you know - he realized he couldn’t do it, and now he wants to get out. Does that make any sense?"

She sighed. “I hope you’re right, Harry. I mean, I _think_ you're probably right - he doesn't seem like he could kill someone, even if he wanted to. But that doesn't make him someone you should trust.”  


Then something occurred to him. “Why did _you_ think we were sneaking out?”

  
There was a quiet knock on the door and Malfoy slipped inside.  Hermione turned to face him, her mouth going hard. It should have been a long conversation but there wasn’t time, and Hermione seemed to at least be _trying_ to give Malfoy the benefit of the doubt.  That was the most they could have hoped for under the circumstances.

“Granger,” he nodded.

She sighed again, louder this time. “ _Malfoy_.” Luckily they had found a perfect opportunity for her to go straight into problem-solving mode. She sat down at one of the desks, pulled out a parchment, and started listing things. “Right, so - the most pressing issue at the moment is that they won't let you in the house," Hermione said. "The best thing would be if your father brought you inside himself, or another member of the household came to fetch you. Assuming that the wards are fairly standard, it shouldn’t throw up any alarms.”

Malfoy nodded. "If we're going to get inside, I'll have to be invited - everyone in the house is aware that Father and I are not on the best of terms. They’ve made a few changes to the wards, but I honestly don’t know how they would react to someone who's been changed by Polyjuice potion, as you suggested. Anyway, there’s nothing inherently dangerous about them. They maybe a little more... visually disturbing than house wards usually are. Hallucinations of larvae burrowing under the skin as the offender is being disemboweled. That sort of thing."  
  
Hermione's face must have shown how horrified she was, because Malfoy was clearly delighted.  
  
"It’s perfectly ordinary in the old wizarding houses. The Malfoys never did bother with 'no trespassing' signs, Granger.  They’re entirely non-lethal to Muggles, at any rate, and any witch or wizard clever enough to find the front gate would know better than to walk in unannounced."  
  
Hermione bit her quill.  "So the question is, what would be urgent enough to make them _invite_ you inside, without raising any red flags?"

Malfoy laughed mirthlessly. “Father told me he didn’t want to hear from me again unless I was literally dying of consumption.”

"That," said Harry, "is not a terrible idea."

*******

Half an hour later they had a plan. Malfoy was coming back from the hospital wing, where he had employed a disillusionment charm to quietly nick several items they would need for the first stage of the operation.  "Did you find what you were looking for?"  
  
Malfoy reached into his in pockets and pulled out six bottles of various potions and a thin, ancient-looking folio about the size of a brochure.  
  
"Good," Hermione said, frowning. "Now the timing is going to be extremely important if you want this to work and not, you know,” she waved her hand a bit vaguely, “die of internal hemorrhaging. We can use Eschert's formulas and the dosing tables to determine what the side effects of an intentional overdose would be, along with likely potion interactions.  Since each of the potions I’ve suggested uses a different base I think it should be possible to come up with a non-lethal combination." She handed him a slim piece of chalk and divided the board in two with a vertical line.  "We'll each work the same problem independently and then compare, all right?" Malfoy nodded. All of his usual smirking and sniveling was gone.  “This is a very stupid idea, and if you want it to work, it’s going to have to be perfect,” she said.    
  
"What do you want me to do?” Harry asked. Hermione and Malfoy looked at one another and sort of grimaced at the same time, as though trying hard not to say something condescending.  "You could find us some warm clothes?" Malfoy ventured.

"We'll need the Polyjuice potion in my trunk,” Hermione said.  “It’s been under a stasis spell for over a year, but it should be fine.  You can sneak onto the girls' side if you put on a pair of my shoes," she added, handing him her cream-colored flats with the little bows.  "The floors are charmed to recognize us according to our our footprints. Don’t tell anyone that, it’s a nice bit of magic and I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about going into the girls' dormitory at night. It's the pink bottle that says 'live bees'.  You should also grab the blue barrettes with the butterflies on them and the lavender shampoo, don’t ask why, we can talk about it later. Oh! and fetch your invisibility cloak," Hermione added.  “Of course.”  
  
Malfoy back and forth between them incredulously, finally settling on Harry with profound irritation. "We've been sneaking around this castle for over a week, and you didn't tell me you had -"  
  
“Focus, Malfoy! _Maths_.”  And that was that.

*******

The plan appealed to Harry because, first of all, it involved beating the living shit out of Malfoy Malfoy.  
  
Malfoy insisted that the injuries had to be extensive _but not life-threatening_ if he was going to be invited back inside his father's house.  A single, more serious injury wouldn't do the job, because Madame Pomfrey was reasonably competent (loathe as he was to admit this), and the more complicated hexes ran the risk of causing permanent spell damage. The school would naturally send him to St. Mungo's, from whence he would be whisked away to the Manor and the care of their private family physician.  
  
"Three minutes in hospital and my father will be breaking down the door," Malfoy told him. "I mean for one thing they'd catch sight of this fucking..." he pulled up the sleeve of his robe and gestured helplessly at the Dark Mark burned into his arm, his face twisting up with hatred - "aberration, and he can’t be having with that at all. But it's more about pride than anything, no surprise there. He'd never leave me in the care of ‘those people.’  A Malfoy hasn't spent the night in hospital for more than 150 years, and the last time was only because my great great aunt Ephaedre was literally torn limb from limb by a mob."  
  
Harry stared at him when he said this. He tried very hard to get his mouth to close.  
  
"She was all right in the end," Malfoy assured him.  "Her grandmother was a half-hydra, nasty things but incredibly hard to kill - so all the important bits eventually grew back. From what I've heard, though, she got what was coming to her."  
  
They ran into problems early on. "You can't just _stand there_ , Malfoy," Harry moaned at him, fists falling uselessly at his sides.  "I feel awful!"  
  
"Lucky for us, then, that the fate of the wizarding world does not hinge upon you and your tender feelings, Potter," he spat, his speech slurring very slightly from what might have been a minor concussion. "I am the one being assaulted here. Please don't tell me this is too difficult _for you_."  
  
Harry scowled at him. How was it that Malfoy looked so tall and self-assured when he was being difficult? "Yeah, all right, but I can't fight someone who's just lying there waiting to be kicked in the head. It's unsettling. It's like I'm beating a puppy to death.  Can't you, I don't know… fight back a bit?"  
  
Malfoy stood up slowly, wincing as he touched the ribs on his left side - bruised, but probably not broken.  He smiled wickedly.  "Are you saying you'd like me to punch you in the face?"  
  
Harry laughed, realizing how stupid that sounded, and then shrugged.  "I guess I'd like you to try." Malfoy sighed and beamed at him - a genuinely happy, uncomplicated smile that made him look handsome and kind and made Harry wonder if he had actually misjudged him a bit during last few years of their acquaintance.    
  
And then there was a sharp sound and the tang of blood in Harry's mouth, and the whole world was alight with pain. Harry realized that his nose was almost certainly broken, and the two of them collapsed on the stone floor in a glorious mess of blood and fists and curses, both of them riotously happy for reasons that neither of them would have been willing to discuss.  
  
Ten minutes later they were sprawled on the floor, laughing and wincing with pain.  They had chosen to stage their fight in an abandoned, mouldering classroom on the dungeon level that looked like it had been in need of renovations for about 50 years.  The books were all damp and the floor had an odd, oily sheen to it.  Harry worried what it might do to his clothes. "I fucking hate you, Potter," Malfoy mumbled softly, staring at him upside-down.  He touched his possibly-dislocated shoulder and looked like he might faint.  
  
Harry smiled, reaching up to place his hands under his own head like a pillow and hissing at the pain in his sides. "Same."  
  
"This has been - well. I appreciate the effort that went into this little performance, and the bruising will certainly add credibility, but I don't think anything is actually broken.  I don't fancy being pushed down a flight of stairs, so - would you mind just getting this over with quickly?"  
  
Harry looked worried. "What, you want me to hit you harder? If nothing's broken yet, I don't think  I have it in me. I'm spent. This is all pretty weird, anyway, Malfoy."  
  
Malfoy pressed his lips together, annoyed or possibly just determined. "Potter, you are going to have to break some bones using _magic_. Heard of magic, have you? Excellent.  Now come over here and let me show you the wand movements."  
  
Harry's eyes grew wide.  "Jesus, Malfoy. Why would you even know a spell like that?"  
  
Malfoy definitely looked irritated now. "I'm not running around breaking the legs of orphans, Potter, as you seem to be implying. It's basic first aid - for when a healing spell is cast incorrectly.  You can't let it grow back the wrong way, it's disgusting, you have to start again with a clean break.  Honestly, were you raised by trolls?"  
  
"Muggles," Harry reminded him.     
  
"I expect that's more or less the same thing."  
  
Harry wanted to object, but he was tired, and as he thought back over years of snide, stupid bullies and unsympathetic teachers during his years living with the Dursleys, he couldn't find it in himself to argue. "Yeah, probably.  I don't know.  I think I might have been better off with trolls, to be honest."  
  
Malfoy's response started as a giggle and shifted into cursing as he clutched at his left side, trying not to breathe the wrong way. It was a perplexing sound, almost pleasant - and then he set about teaching Harry how to hurt him very, very badly.    
  
"The incantation is _freggio_ , with the emphasis on the first syllable. Pay attention to your diction, or you'll - forgive me, Potter, is this _boring_ you?"  
  
Harry snapped back to attention and shook his head.  He tried to listen carefully and imitated the wand movements, but part of him was quietly going to pieces over the idea that Malfoy loved his mother this much.  It was so unlike the Malfoy he had grown accustomed to - hateful and petty and self-serving - and he didn't know what to do with it. Flowers on Mothers Day was one thing. This was… something else.  
  
"Potter! Seriously, I hate to annoy you with the details of my imminent bodily harm -"  
  
"Don't you want anything for the pain, though?'  
  
For some reason that wiped the sneer right off Malfoy's face.  He nodded and touched his wand to the top of his own head, whispering _consolarum aggregi_ before his jaw went slack. "Be careful, Potter,” he slurred.  “I’m… I am putting my fucking life in your unwashed and almost certainly incompetent hands."  
  
Harry broke Malfoy's leg in two places, shattered one wrist (taking care to leave his wand arm uninjured), and damaged a few ribs on the left hand side. With each injury Malfoy looked paler and more frightened, but he said nothing - just nodded for Harry to go on. It was gruesome and strange, and made Harry feel vaguely ashamed of himself.  
  
"Malfoy," he said at last, hearing tightness in his own voice.  "I don't think I can do any more of this." He brushed a few tears out of his eyes, feeling embarrassed.  
  
"I'd better get Hermione," he said, yanking the invisibility cloak out of his bag and throwing it over his head.  "Are you going to be OK while I'm gone?"  
  
Malfoy said something that Harry didn't quite catch.  
  
"Sorry?"  
  
His eyes were glassy. He looked like he might be going into shock "Hurry," he whimpered, and Harry bolted up the stairs.

*******

Hermione was waiting for him in a hidden alcove of the library. He pulled off his invisibility cloak as soon as he was out of sight of Madame Pince.  
  
"Harry! Thank goodness, I was starting worry. _You_ look awful."  
  
Harry looked down at his robes and shrugged. "A bit rumpled, yeah."  
  
"I mean you face, Harry. Did he break your nose?" She pulled out her wand and started quickly healing the visible cuts and bruises, shaking her head.  She threw in a scourgify for good measure, and said "Now look at me or I know I'll get this wrong," before pointing her wand straight at his nose.

“ _Episkey.”_

The crunching sound made him feel a bit faint, but at least he could breathe now.   "Honestly, Harry, I still sort of think this could be a trap - though I suppose any trap that depends on you and Malfoy getting along for more than five minutes seems pretty far-fetched. Here are the portkeys - I'm not entirely sure I understand the theory behind those, but there's one of each of you - and I've shrunk the potions down to fit inside your bag."  
  
They made sure that Mrs. Pince saw them leave, and then made their way downstairs as quickly and as inconspicuously as they could.  The plan was that they would find Malfoy injured. Harry would run to fetch Madame Pomfrey, and he would then find a way to accompany Malfoy to the hospital for moral support. On the way down to the dungeons they talked.  "It's weird, Hermione, but it's sort of… lovely. I don't think I've ever seen him try to do the right thing before. He really… he loves her quite a lot."  
  
Hermione smiled at him fondly.  "You know, I think you take after Hagrid more than anyone else. Who else would you get involved with such dangerous creatures out of the goodness of their heart?"  


*******

Hermione was applying first aid when Madame Pomfrey arrived, but the injuries were excessive and Madame Pomfrey said that he needed the attentions of an orthopaedic specialist as well as a Mind Healer to help him process such a traumatic experience.  Looking at Malfoy, he could see why she was so shaken.  Harry had never seen her so emotional - usually she seemed to take students' injuries and bad judgment in stride - and it made Harry feel guilty about lying to her.    
  
"Who would do something like this?" she said, dabbing her eyes with the sleeve of her robe and checking Malfoy's heart rate for the third time since he had arrived. She had given him something for the pain, and he lay there looking small and vulnerable, breathing slowly through softly parted lips.   
  
"Well, he has been sort of… insufferable... lately." He thought back to their nights lying together on the cold floor of the Prefects’ bathroom; the time they snuck up to the owlery to look at the stars, for some reason, lost track of time and almost didn’t make it back to their dorms before sunrise. “Insufferable” might not have been the right word.  
  
"That is no excuse, Mr. Potter, none at all! This is not some schoolyard tussle that's gotten out of hand. Mr. Malfoy was lured here on false pretenses and _assaulted_. It's just lucky the two of you found him when you did."  
  
"Harry," Hermione whispered to him, pulling him aside. "Don't make jokes. You must know how this looks to the teachers."  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"Harry, they someone beat him up because he's - well, you know."  
  
"What? A twat?"  
  
"No, Harry, because he's _gay_."  
  
Harry’s stomach went _flump_. Like a wet soufflé.  
  
"Is he?" Harry countered, feeling suddenly stupid.  
  
Hermione's eyes went very wide. "Harry, you've been following him around for the last two years like a… never mind like a what, how could you possibly have failed to notice something like that?"  
  
Harry hadn't really expected her to say that.

Which is not to say that he hadn't been _thinking_ about it. He had been thinking about it pretty hard that morning in the shower, as a matter of fact. He had also spent some time considering it just after lunch. Harry had been pretty sure that he liked boys as well as girls ever since the first time he'd seen Oliver Wood in Quidditch leathers when he was eleven. There was a brief period when he thought it was just because magic was new and Quidditch was new, and anyone would be excited about learning to fly, but the evidence had been pretty clear. Growing up around the Dursleys, Harry had learned that sex (especially "weird sex") was not something people discussed in polite company, so he hadn't been in any particular hurry to out himself. But Hermione was saying it like it was common knowledge that Malfoy was gay. Was he seeing anyone? Harry frowned. _Was it Zabini?_

But actually, it gave him an idea. If it was common knowledge that Malfoy was gay, then it made everything much easier.  He and Malfoy had already thought of an excuse for him to come along to hospital, but it was flimsy and complicated; neither of them was really sure it would work. This was much better.  
  
Harry walked over to where Malfoy was lying on a table, threaded their fingers together, and kissed him carefully on the forehead. He smelled like lemons and soap, and Harry felt something in his chest tighten, which was fine and perfectly understandable. He was probably nervous about their plan. But Malfoy's skin was soft and warm under his lips, and he allowed his mouth to linger there for just a second longer than was strictly necessary.  Malfoy turned and looked daggers at him, but he kept his mouth shut.  
  
"We're ready to go whenever you are," he told Madame Pomfrey, who - to her credit - managed to look astonished for only a few seconds before straightening up and smiling. She seemed to take them in in a moment - hands tightly clasped, his stomach pressed against Malfoy's arm where he lay on the table, eyes locked.  
  
"Certainly, boys - Harry, I'll speak to Professor McGonagall, let her know you'll be accompanying your - classmate.  The portkey is right here.  Ready in 5, 4, 3…"

*******

"You might be the stupidest person I have ever laid eyes on," Malfoy said, glaring at him weakly from his hospital bed.  "This is why people are always trying to kill you, Potter. _This._ "  
  
"Hardly anybody even knows you're here!"  
  
The nurses had given them a room as soon as they arrived and given Malfoy something extra for his pain. They were waiting for it to kick in before mixing it with the other potions they had brought. "Harry Potter is fawning all over me at my bedside and holding my hand, do you think anyone will mention it to the press?"  Harry felt his face grow hot. He stepped back at once and shoved his hands into the pockets of his robes, fists clenching and unclenching. He hadn’t really thought about the press, but now that Malfoy mentioned it, he realized that he didn’t care. So what if they got the wrong idea? They always got the wrong idea. "If reporters show up it'll be almost impossible to get out of here."  
  
Harry waved his hand dismissively. "Invisibility cloak, remember? We'll be fine."

"Do you really want your deviant sex life on the front page of the _Prophet_?" he sneered.

Harry shrugged. "Better you than Ron."  
  
Malfoy laughed and covered his face with his bedsheet. When he emerged his cheeks were a bit pinker than when they'd first arrived. "That is a singularly disturbing thought, and I will never forgive you for putting it in my head. Whatever is wrong with you, Potter - it had better not be contagious."  
  
Harry beamed at him. "What exactly would I infect you with? My charm? A functioning moral compass? Unmanageable hair?"  
  
"Oh my God, Potter, your hair is vile - you know I had a dream once about strapping you down and cursing it all off at once?"  
  
Harry bit his lower lip as he considered this. "Oh,” he said, his voice lower than he'd meant it to be. He knew Malfoy hadn't meant it like _that_ , except that when he chanced a look at Malfoy, he was staring at Harry's mouth in a way that left him a little unbalanced. Harry coughed and looked at the floor. They had things to do, he had to right this ship before everybody drowned. "How much longer until we can start on the other potions?"

Malfoy cast a _Tempus_. "Eight minutes."

“It wouldn't do any good - cutting my hair. I’ve tried everything, it always grows back by the next morning."  
  
Malfoy settled back into the bed and ran his fingers through his own hair, managing to look irritatingly refined and self-possessed for someone in a hospital gown.  "Right. Well. Just don't blame me if my father tries to violently castrate you the moment he walks in the door."  
  
As luck would have it, Harry wasn't even in the room when Lucius arrived. He had gone to the loo and was just about to come back out into the hallway when he heard someone say Malfoy's name in a low whisper, and he recognized the unmistakable tone in the man's voice - _gossip_. He stopped and pressed himself to the wall. There were three nurses out there, discussing Malfoy’s situation in hushed tones.  
  
"… just running diagnostics, and his whole body lit up like a Christmas tree."  
  
"That's expected, though, right? I mean he looked like he'd been thrown down a well."  
  
His friend seemed impatient with this response. "Yes, but it was almost all _blue_ , is what I'm telling you. There were a handful of new injuries, but it was like somebody had sprayed neon blue paint all over the boy. I couldn't tell where one injury started and another stopped. Everywhere except his face, which is just… I mean that seems premeditated, doesn't it? Some of them looked like they were from at least five years ago."  
  
Harry stopped breathing. Malfoy had said almost nothing about his relationship with his father. Harry had known, however, that there was something _wrong_ there; that something had been wrong with it well before Voldemort appeared on their doorstep. He heard it in the way Malfoy avoided saying his father's name; the way he steered conversations away when they skirted his father's involvement in Voldemort's return, and the way that every single happy memory from his childhood seemed to circle back to his mother. Every one.  
  
"How many injuries?" someone asked.  
  
Harry pressed a hand against the cool grey wall beside him and waited for the answer, trying not to breathe loudly and give himself away.  The nurse let out a long, sad sigh.  "I'm saying I couldn't have counted if I'd tried."  
  
When they left, Harry walked back to Malfoy's room a little more slowly than he'd intended. He trying to process what he'd heard. Should he bring it up at with Malfoy? Should he pretend nothing had happened?

But he didn't have to worry about the awkwardness of broaching such an emotional subject after all, because as he approached Malfoy's hospital room he heard two voices in the room.  
  
"I've made arrangements for you to come home for a few days to recover. There is no need to inconvenience the staff here any more than you already have." Harry crept inside, hugging the wall, and quietly cast a silencing spell over the whole room. If the hospital staff showed up, everything would be over before it even began.  
  
"What have you done with her?" Harry loved the way that he turned his condescension on his father. When properly aimed, Malfoy's disdain was a beautiful thing to see.  
  
Lucius made an audible sound of disgust. "Look at you," he sneered. "Always demanding her attention. Everyone's attention."  
  
" _Where is she!_ " Malfoy growled, and Harry winced as he heard a hard slap and the crack of a skull hitting the wall.  Narcissa hadn't come along. They hadn’t really expected her to, of course, but for some reason Harry was still disappointed.  
  
His father continued as if nothing had happened. "Your mother has not been well, Malfoy, as you are perfectly aware. Surely you would not wish her to risk her delicate health -"  


"Her only child has nearly been beaten to death.  She must be hysterical."  
  
"Be that as it may -"  
  
"You can understand how, given the circumstances, her absence gives me pause. If she is not well enough to visit her son on the occasion of his attempted murder, perhaps she needs the attentions of a specialist healer. In a hospital. People will wonder."  
  
"Silence, you ungrateful aberration. Throwing a tantrum will not compel me to drag your poor mother out here so she can be harassed and looked at by strangers. She is being cared for in her own home, as is decent, and I will not put her on display for the public just to satisfy some childish whim of yours."  
  
"It's still in your power to act!" Malfoy said, his voice cracking and threatening to break.  "Why won't you fight for us?"   
  
Lucius had his arm raised above his head when Harry hit him with a stinging hex right across the back. It seemed to carry more force than usual, and Lucius winced, wheeling around, wand already in hand as his mouth curled up into a wicked smile. Harry followed it quickly with a Leglocker jinx that the man easily sidestepped.   
  
" _You_. Why am I not surprised?" he sneered. He cast something that Harry did not recognize, and the floor under his feet began to crumble like wet sand.

"Depulso!" Harry cried, causing a heavy chair by the doorway to fly across the room and hit Lucius across the stomach. But then something swept over Harry - a wordless spell, something he didn't recognize again, and he felt as though the air trapped in his lungs had turned to concrete. He felt terribly heavy.

Lucius righted himself as Harry gasped and heaved, unable to catch his breath. He coughed up something wet - mud, he thought as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His lungs were full of mud. Then Lucius whipped his wand carelessly and cast, _"Cruci-"_   
  
Malfoy hit him in the back with a full body bind. Lucius paused, a look of surprise on his face as he dropped. Like a bird shot out of the sky.  


Harry locked the door behind him.

  
Malfoy was looking at him with wide eyes, terror written all over his face. They had just attacked his father - apparently without provocation - and now they were going to rob him.  Harry didn't know what to say to make the whole thing feel less surreal, so he set to work and gave Malfoy a moment to think.

  
"You need to start on the potions now," he said. "We have to get out of here before your nurse comes back."

Malfoy looked like he wanted to say something, but instead he just fumbled with the satchel Hermione had packed for them, hands shaking, and pulled out several carefully labelled bottles. He took one deep, rasping breath and downed an entire bottle of bone-mending potion in one gulp, followed by a tumbler full of brown liquid from his family's own supplies (Widdles had turned out to be quite handy in this regard), that Malfoy had earlier described as "about five hundred galleons worth of dittany."  This part of the plan had had to be researched carefully and executed with extreme caution, because while the combination would more or less heal Malfoy's breaks and bruises in half an hour, it would also wreck his liver and lead to intense headaches that would probably last for several weeks.  A liver repair potion would help mitigate the effects somewhat, but it couldn't be taken for at least 45 minutes after the other two had taken effect and needed to be followed up with a lower dose every hour. Even then, Malfoy told him sadly, he would probably never be able to drink alcohol again without ending up in hospital. "Which is for the best, really," Harry told him. "You're a right enough arsehole when you're sober."  
  
Malfoy then quietly emptied the pink, yellow and green vials that the hospital staff had provided him for pain relief, licking his lips and giving Harry a slow, hazy stare.  They had discussed this as well, but for some reason it was still hard to watch. Mixing potions was generally frowned upon.

Harry stripped off Lucius’s outer robes, leaving him dressed in an unexpectedly dapper white waistcoat and a pair of striped trousers. Was this really what psychopaths and child abusers wore to the office?  He yanked several hairs from his head with a single stroke, stuffing them inside a small paper bag that he handed to Malfoy. Harry then covered the body with an extra blanket and started stuffing it under Malfoy's bed.  
  
Malfoy finally broke the silence. "Thank Circe you got here when you did, Potter.  He never knows when to shut up."  Malfoy still sounded shaken, but maybe this was his way of coping.   
  
"Yes, he reminds me of someone," said Harry pleasantly.  Malfoy was trying to stand up now. "How are you so bloody calm?" Harry asked. "I'm about three minutes away from a panic attack here -"  
  
"Actually, this - these potions make you feel like a lovely pink cloud.” He teetered slightly. “You should have some."  
  
Harry inclined his head to one side, wondering how many doses were in each bottle. "Yes, well." He said. "You drank them all."  
  
Malfoy seemed to consider this.  "Have I though?" He peered at the bottles closely for a moment before losing interest.  "Don't worry, Potter.  I will be right as rain before you can say 'Gillywaf- gillendwaf, oh, fuck's sake," he said.  "Well, before _I_ can say it, at any rate."  
  
Harry shook his head.  "You've got to be careful, though. You've got at least four broken bones-"  
  
"All better now, in theory, except probably the bones will shatter if anyone so much as hugs me enthusiastically." He looked at Harry pointedly for some reason and frowned. "When you hug me, you must be _extremely careful_ , Potter."  
  
Harry smiled and bit his lip. The potions had turned Malfoy soft and wooly around the edges, and hugging him sounded rather nice at the moment. "Not to mention that we've just attacked your father and stuffed him under a bed -"  
  
"Well, _you_ stuffed him under the bed. You're a much more supersp…  shursp.. suspicious…. suspect than I."  
  
"Yeah, all right -"   
  
Malfoy's voice was slightly wobbly, but he looked pleased with himself.  "All _I_ did was hex him so hard that his hands and his face swelled up like blu, like - like _balloons_ , Potter, rather, and his voice would be useless for the next 48 hours."  
  
"What?" Harry blinked. "When did you-"  
  
"Juss now," Malfoy said with a scowl, grasping his wand and casting something nasty at his father's face. He casually retrieved his father's wand, as well as his watch from the pocket of his waistcoat. He checked the time.  
  
"Fucking coward," he said as he tucked the blanket around his father’s head. Then Harry cast a disillusionment charm, which would leave the body more or less undetectable until someone started poking around in the right places.  
  
Malfoy stood up very slowly. He moved his body like it was a weight he was trapped under, but with a tremendous effort he managed to pull himself up to his full height and smoothed a few stray hairs back into place. He scraped out a self-satisfied laugh that could have cut glass, painful and desperate, and Harry thought about what the nurse had said in the toilet. He'd always thought that Malfoy looked up to his father, practically worshiped him, in spite of the obvious coldness and his harsh words - but Harry wasn't stupid. You could kill yourself trying to please someone who despised and tortured you for years. He had spent almost 10 years trying to make himself loveable to the Dursleys; to make himself worth something to them, worthy of affection. It had never been enough. Harry had tried to make himself smaller, make himself _normal_ , and he had failed every step of the way.  Staring at the door now, trembling - whether from the potions or the adrenaline, it was hard to say - Malfoy looked like a prisoner of war. Like he'd just heard he was getting out, he was free, but he couldn't get his body to go along with it.  
  
"I'm living out my childhood fantasies, here, Potter," he said in a voice so small and angry that it was hardly more than a whisper.  "What's a few broken bones?"

 


	3. Chapter 3

Harry pulled out his invisibility cloak. He peeked through the door. There was a witch in blue robes standing in front of a closet, nervously ticking things off on her clipboard and patiently trying to stuff a quill up her nose. She kept sneezing. Under different circumstances, it would have been mesmerizing. 

They were going the opposite direction; they could probably get there undetected if they were quiet.  He turned around to tell Malfoy to hurry up and found him slumped against the wall, his legs shaking and his jaw clenched tight. "Idiot," whispered Harry fondly, looking at the way Malfoy was shuffling along "Lean on me, all right?"  
  
Malfoy scowled at Harry but didn't bother to argue. When Harry slid an arm around his waist, he felt Malfoy's warm weight relax against him. Harry threw the cloak over them both, trying his best to cover their feet, and started to pad down the hall. He found his skin growing hot at the close contact - Malfoy's lean muscles and long limbs, the carefully controlled movements punctuated by a sharp intake of breath whenever he moved too quickly or shifted the wrong way.

  
Harry held Malfoy a little closer, trying to find the right balance, and caught the scent of sweat and soap mixed with something dark, almost resinous, that made him think of dark forest pathways and cold lake water grazing his fingertips. It was strange being this close to Malfoy. It felt like too much - too casual, maybe, or too intimate, or too much. Harry needed to stay focused.  He knew that the real Malfoy was vicious and calculating, selfish in the extreme, but he was more than that as well. Harry didn't know if he could bring himself to ask about what he had heard in the hallway. It was none of his business. Surely Malfoy would rather hex him than have a heart-to-heart about their abusive childhoods, and yet Harry couldn’t stop imagining him - a slight, blonde-headed child with silver eyes, being beaten and cursed by the person who was charged with keeping him safe. He felt like it was a lot to take on a Tuesday afternoon.   
  
At the end of the hallway, they ducked into the area where the service elevators all stood vacant.  There was a small floo there, used primarily for maintenance workers coming and going in the middle of the night. Both Harry and Malfoy had started learning to Apparate this year, but with the trace still on them, it seemed safer to go this way.  
  
Malfoy extracted himself from Harry's support with the air of someone who is trying very hard to be polite to a child. "Thank you," he grated out.  He squared his shoulders, pain still creasing his forehead, and grabbed a pinch of floo powder and hobbled into the fireplace. "Trowbridge," he said as he threw down the powder in a small, precise movement, "blind alley behind Elsabet's."  Harry followed.

* * *

Elsabet’s turned out to be a Muggle café sandwiched between a pair of gorgeous Victorian houses. Several of these stood nearby, and appeared to have been converted into loft space for the local inhabitants.  Seen from the front, they would have been inspiring structures with tall, curved windows and heavy stonework in shades of sepia and grey, but Harry and Malfoy were not seeing them from the front.  The floo had deposited them in a dirty alleyway between a poorly managed hedge and a gardener’s shed where an old outdoor fireplace had been built to keep horses and drivers warm while they waited outside in the snow.  The chimney had mostly collapsed in on itself, but it was still perfectly serviceable for floo travel.

They changed out of their robes as quickly as possible. Malfoy was still feeling delicate, so Harry pulled the robes gently over Malfoy’s head, trying to avoid positions that would require him to move his left arm too much. Harry reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of heavy jumpers he’d packed for the trip, realizing with some embarrassment that they were both from Mrs. Weasley. He and Malfoy were going to _match_.  But Malfoy was shivering in his hospital gown, so Harry yanked the blue one down over his head and stuffed his arms in carefully. There was an awkward moment when he was trying to wrestle a pair of trousers onto the other boy, but Malfoy had the idea to sit down on a bit of masonry wall so that Harry could get the legs on properly, and after that he was able to sort of shuffle them up over his own hips with one hand.  By the time this operation was finished, Harry’s arms were going numb from the cold.  He grabbed the second jumper (maroon, possibly a size too small but at least it covered the important bits), pulled it over his own head and wrapped a scarf around each of their necks and faces.  Malfoy glanced down at his and scowled.  Gryffindor colors.

"I feel disgusting,” he said mournfully.

“It’s not that bad,” Harry told him. He thought it looked rather nice on Malfoy, actually. Especially with his cheeks all pink from the cold and his hair mussed from having a big wooly jumper dragged over his head, and his sleeves slightly crooked because apparently, Harry hadn't any practice with dressing other people.  It made him look like a baby bird.

Malfoy sighed.  “If anyone sees me like this, Potter, I will be forced to kill myself. And you, of course - first you.”

He turned around then and limped, with as much dignity as he could muster, towards the nearest road - Drynham, Harry read on the sign as they approached. Malfoy was holding himself a bit straighter, but after a short walk he had to stop and catch his breath. “You go first. Find us one of those… omnibus things - public carriages - and we’ll be on our way.”  His voice was calm, but his lips were pressed together and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead from the brief exertion. It was a wonder he was standing at all, let alone looking down his nose at Harry and ordering him about. Something warm fluttered in Harry's stomach, and he batted it away easily with the force of habit and a fair bit of willpower.  _Malfoy was going to be fine_.

He walked half a block until he found a bus stop right in front of a local pub, but upon reading the map found that it would be at least two hours before anything was going their way. There were no taxis nearby, either - it looked to be a residential area. 

Malfoy just rolled his eyes when Harry told him this. He pulled out his wand and tapped it gently on the top of his own head.  _Opulensa_ , he uttered crisply. Nothing happened.  Very slowly, Malfoy’s lips and teeth coalesced to form the most insufferable, shit-eating grin he'd had ever seen on a human being - it was dazzling, in its own way.

“Oh lovely, that seemed to work,” said Harry, trying and failing to put any real annoyance behind the words.

Thirty seconds later a taxi pulled up to the curb and flung its doors wide open.

“That seems like a very... _specific_ spell,” Harry mused. “Ride in taxis often, do you?”

Malfoy made a face. “Heavens no, Potter, what an unpleasant imagination you have.  The spell just gives people a vague feeling that there’s quite a lot of money to be made nearby. It comes in handy," he sniffed, as the Pub owner came shuffling down the street excitedly to see if Harry was lost and needed a place to stay for the night.  They waved him off, hopped inside the taxi and headed south.

They stopped a quarter mile from the gate and paid the taxi driver.  Malfoy produced an intricately embroidered black velvet coin purse stuffed with Muggle cash and coins, which Harry snatched away from him with a frown. Picking through the bag (which contained a random assortment of cash from at least seven countries and, Harry noted with a sort of perverse pleasure, two different laundromats) he finally put together enough to pay the man and send him on his way. 

They stepped out onto a tree-covered lawn.  Above them a red-tailed hawk wheeled in long, slow circles, watching the ground for movement. It would be dark in an hour. Once the driver was out of sight Malfoy produced several half-full bottles of Polyjuice potion and one of three long, silver strands of hair they had taken from his father that afternoon.  He dropped it into one of the vials, where it bubbled and hissed like mad.

“Are you sure about this, Potter?” he said, frowning.

Harry nodded.  “You?”

Malfoy looked up at the clouds, took a deep breath. “Pretty sure.” He twisted a ring off of his right hand - wrought silver, twisted into the shape of creeping ivy, with a little hinge on top that opened a box no more than three millimetres wide - and pressed it into Harry’s hand.

“Portkey,” he explained, looking Harry straight in the eye. “The ones Granger gave us won't work on the grounds, though you should keep it on you anyway just in case. There’s a small glass bead inside That locket.  For emergencies.  It’ll take you to straight to the embassy for the Ministry of Magic in Italy, wards or no wards.”

“And where’s yours?” Harry asked, slipping it onto one of the fingers of his left hand.

Malfoy held up a small, jewel-encrusted brooch in the shape of a box elder bug. “It belonged to my great-great-aunt Velorum. Lovely woman. Burned at the stake in Calispell in 1911."

“Ugh. That’s horrible,” Harry said.

“Oh, it was more for show than anything," he said off-handedly.  "I think she enjoyed getting everyone riled up. Real witches don’t burn if they don’t want to.”  Harry watched, fascinated, as Malfoy began the delicate process of transfiguring a pile of dead leaves and branches into an elaborate palanquin with grey-brown pillows.  When he was done he lay down on it, trying to look as pathetic as humanly possible.  He hadn’t ever really appreciated how adept Malfoy was with a wand. Harry was pretty sure that _he_ didn’t look like that when he was casting a spell - graceful and composed, like an artist dragging paint across a huge empty canvas, and Harry could imagine -

“Come the fuck on, Potter!” Malfoy shouted, calling him back to his senses. Harry gulped half of his vial of potion in one go, feeling his vision go sort of thick and mauve and _furry_ for a moment before the thing took effect. 

Polyjuice potion was always so unsettling at first. He felt taller and a bit lighter on his feet.  Long, white-blonde hair tickled his ears and the back of his neck maddeningly.  He pulled out the robes they had taken off of Lucius, heavy and fine and smelling of ink, and Malfoy reached up to hand him his father's wand and pocket watch. The keys to the wards.  He levitated Malfoy’s ridiculous palanquin with a swish of his wand and marched up to the gates of Malfoy Manor.

*******

They strode silently along an endless white-bricked walkway hemmed in by dead and dying vines, past a maze of carefully manicured hedges and tiered garden plots now empty and piled high with beds of hay, bleached white by the cold November sunshine. Harry held his breath while they passed under the naked branches of ash trees, black limbs tangling above their heads like the fraying threads of an old carpet.  Dread was creeping up from the bone-bright paving stones and into Harry's knees, the whole world suddenly gone cold and hard and hostile. Harry felt exposed.  Even if the servants and Death Eaters inside believed he was Lucius Malfoy, the house would know the difference. He was sure of it.

They passed under the wards. Nothing happened.  
  
Malfoy broke the silence with a cough, and Harry looked up to see a wiry man in faded a black pinstriped suit sliding out the front door and oozing down the front steps to greet him. Harry threw back his shoulders and tried to look as though he was being inconvenienced.  
  
When he was near enough, the man made an insipid bow and steepled his long fingers together like an actual horror movie villain. He bobbed his head excitedly, nearly meeting Harry's gaze with his wandering eyes and disturbing smile.  "At last!" came his greeting, his voice wet and shaky and oddly worshipful, as though his life's ambitions started and ended somewhere underneath Lucius Malfoy's boot. Harry suppressed a shudder at the touch of the man's hand on his elbow, guiding him inside the front door and giving him a summary of the morning's events so far, inserting question marks here and there, seemingly at random, like little feathers sticking out of a lady's hat. Harry nodded and sneered, and finally interrupted him with the excuse they had practiced again and again in the cab.  "Very well then.  I have arrangements to make for my idiot son, and there are a few pieces of correspondence with members of the Wizengamot that cannot wait.  See to it that I am not disturbed for the next hour."  
  
He said it softly, almost whispered it, because Malfoy said that it was harder to distinguish between voices when they were whispered. He said it (hopefully) with the unwavering conviction of someone who is lying to save his life. The little man - Mulciber Pyle, Malfoy had called him - looked at Harry through the surprised, watery pinpricks of his eyes, and stammered. "But I, but, but, Lord Malfoy. I beg you will forgive me for reminding you that Lord Greyback has been waiting all morning to see you about the, ah? pressing matter you had discussed with him earlier? He is in the library?"  
  
Harry shook his head. "Let him wait." Mulciber looked terrified at the thought of taking such an answer back to a werewolf, but that wasn't Harry's problem. He dismissed the man with a wave of his hand.

Now thankfully alone, he guided Malfoy's narrow palanquin through the doorway and into the hall. They proceeded silently up the steps to his bedroom. They walked through marble archways that opened on huge, empty rooms that were nevertheless stuffed with furniture. They passed by a library, as well - the smell of books and ink catching Harry's notice before he saw the plate on the door. And they went by dozens of family portraits, all but one of them empty, their inhabitants having fled the Dark Lord's occupation. Harry tried hard not to gawk at the enormous fountain on the third floor landing, filled with tiny fish that changed color as you looked at them. And then they turned left, and they were in Malfoy's bedroom.

“Well,” Harry said.

“That was far too easy,” Malfoy told him, sitting up abruptly and casting a locking spell over his shoulder. He threw his legs over the side of the palanquin and turned out his pockets.

“You seem to be feeling better,” said Harry. Malfoy _was_ moving more easily, standing up straighter. It was encouraging.  By this time Hermione had predicted that his body would be more or less back to normal, but had warned that his immune response and nervous system would still be on high alert.  There was a serious danger of seizures and involuntary muscle spasms during the next four days, along with the more common side effects of splitting headaches, changes in vision, and a taste at the back of the throat that had been curiously but consistently described as “pigeon-like” in every text she consulted, even by Hatzcui of Uruqal, a prominent central American wizard in the 11 th century who had probably never seen or eaten a pigeon in his life.

"Let's get this over with," Malfoy said. He took out his bottle of Polyjuice potion and handed the other to Harry. They had extra on hand just in case their search took a bit longer than expected.  He laid a little waxed paper packet on his desk and opened it to reveal a pair of grimy toenail clippings - Widdles's, presumably, though there was no way to tell. Harry felt a bit sick.  
  
"I wonder if it's dangerous - changing into a house elf? Anatomically they're not at all like humans - they don’t even _have_ spleens, did you know?"  
  
Harry shook his head. He reached out and squeezed Malfoy's hand gently, hoping to reassure him. Malfoy looked down at the floor and then, quite deliberately, laced their fingers together. Harry's breath hitched. He tried to swallow quietly. This was extremely nice.  Why couldn’t everything be this nice? He wanted to say “Don’t die,” but Malfoy would only roll his eyes at him and say something sarcastic, and they would miss out on this one nice moment, so he just hummed. After a little while Harry brushed his fingertips softly up and down Malfoy's wrist and let him go.

Malfoy had taken a lot of potions. Harry knew this and knew that both Malfoy and Hermione had considered possible interactions, but potions were magic, not just drugs, and they could be unpredictable. It seemed dangerous to have seven different types of magic bouncing around inside of one person. He wanted to tell Malfoy to be careful, but he was _always_ careful, or so Harry though. He looked up and found Malfoy staring at him, lips parted, lips soft. "This would be better," he said, "if you didn't look my father."

Harry cleared his throat. "Who should I look like, then?"

"Oh, you know," said Malfoy dismissively. "Just - you.".  
  
There wasn't a lot of time. Malfoy picked up the waxed paper and tipped its contents neatly into one of the remaining bottles. He waited for the reaction die down, then poured it into his throat without comment, gagging violently. He hiccoughed as well. He had always been a bit over-dramatic.

Within a few seconds Malfoy's body was bending and shrinking down, the contortions of cross-species transformation at once fascinating and horrible to watch. There was a simultaneous elongation of the facial features and a shortening of limbs, accompanied by little gurgling noises like the pumps on a steam engine, as Malfoy's internal organs rearranged themselves and, in some cases, disappeared altogether. Malfoy bent over double, retching horribly into a beautiful cut crystal vase perched on the end table. He then vomited the rest of his breakfast all over a white woolen rug that sat at the foot of his bed.  He wiped his mouth, looked up at Harry with two great saucers for eyes and blinked furiously at him.  
  
"You have the map I gave you?” he squeaked, struggling to make use of his new vocal cords and oddly shaped mouth.  
  
Harry nodded and produced it from his satchel.  Two dots were labeled in the southeast corner of the house, surrounded by Malfoy’s hastily-drawn representation of the Manor. It was a version of the spell used for the Marauders’ Map, clumsier but apparently functional, Harry noted with relief. Each of them would know where the other was at, but there would be no real way to communicate.   
  
"Remember, check the blue areas in the order they're numbered. One is the most likely location, seven the least. If you get caught, use the ring. Don’t try to be a hero!” he screeched. “If you die then Granger will never let me hear the end of it."  
  
Malfoy turned and scuttled behind a bookcase, where a small door would give him access to the tiny living spaces between the manor walls. All house elves used these pathways when they needed to carry something or didn’t wish to Appparate, allowing them to slip in and out of rooms undetected. Malfoy had chosen all of the more dangerous locations for his own search - reasonable given his familiarity with the house and the grounds, but still irritating. Harry had argued with him about this and lost. 

Harry’s section was larger but included mostly those parts of the house that were closed during the winter months. There was no way of knowing where Malfoy's mother was being held, and they had less than an hour now to conduct their search.

*******

Harry had just checked off the first location on his map when he reached up to push the hair out of his eyes, and realized that it was no longer white and silky but a thick, ashen grey, and sticking up at odd angles to his face. He reached for his forehead and felt a scar beginning to trace its way down from his hairline. Bugger.

Harry checked his map and ducked into a tiny room labeled as “Wr. 6”, shutting the door behind him and letting the panic settle in. He cast _Lumos_ and checked the pocket watch - he should still have 37 minutes left before the potion wore off. He searched his pockets, silently cursing himself as he searched frantically for the potion from earlier - there should be almost a full dose left in the bottle, which might be enough to get to a few more locations on the map. There were a lot of pockets in Lucius’s robes, however, and as Harry searched he found more and more of them.

“Finally!” he breathed, yanking open the miniscule third breast pocket (perhaps the pockets had been enchanted to be larger on the inside than on the outside?) with such force that it caused the vial to fly several feet into the air.  It arced through his little pool of light, passed swiftly into shadow, and smashed against something heavy and wooden.  Harry swore.

I the silence that followed, it occurred to him that Malfoy’s transformation would probably end sooner than expected as well. Much as he hated to cast doubt on Hermione's skills, something was clearly wrong with the potion and they were both in more danger than they'd realized.  Harry had to warn him. If Malfoy got caught sneaking around, the consequences would be just as bad for him as they would be for Harry. Snape knew that Malfoy had given information to the enemy - soon Voldemort would have this information as well. They would make an example of him.

Harry took a moment to looked around the cupboard and discovered that “Wr. 6” apparently stood for “wardrobe” - he was surrounded by robes and cloaks made from heavy wool and fur.  To his left was a sturdy-looking shelf stacked high with small boxes.  He removed one of the lids and found a pair of women’s shoes made from pale blue silk covered in hand-painted butterflies.  His shoulders sagged. Turning out his pockets once again, Harry came across another vial of the potion and had a sudden bolt of inspiration. This was one of the extra vials they had prepared in case they were found out, in case they needed to disguise themselves as someone else and slip away unseen, so nothing had been added yet to fix the transformation. He would need to find one of Lucius's  hairs to add before the potion would have any effect, but he was surrounded by winter coats.  Surely there would be something dropped on a shoulder or wrapped around a button?

He checked on Malfoy’s location. Headed toward the kitchens and still moving quickly - Harry hoped that this meant he hadn’t been caught yet. He brought his wand in close so that he could see and began searching the closet for usable genetic material. 

The first eleven cloaks turned up nothing - damned house elves and their impeccable cleanliness - and by his estimate Malfoy only had about 12 more minutes left before the potion would wear off. But on number twelve - a severe, expensive-looking wool cloak with a silver clasp at the throat - he hit the jackpot.  Two long, silver-white hairs were hidden under the sharp fold of the collar, and Harry stuffed one into the bottle of potion as quickly as his fingers could manage it.  He knocked back the potion, shuddered through the transformation and burst through the door, checking his map as he went.  He hoped he would find Malfoy before it was too late.

*******

He sort of, _nearly_ , made it on time, too.  He was jogging through the kitchens - plural, he realized with great perplexity - when he heard a sound like a slow-moving explosion.  He ran toward the sound and found Malfoy lying on his back covered in plaster dust and bits of wood, bleeding from a gash in his left leg.  He coughed, spitting out small chunks of plaster, and tried to sit up.

“What did you _do_?” he moaned.

“Something’s wrong with the potion,” Harry explained hastily.  “Maybe it’s not meant to be in stasis for over a year. It’s only working for about 20 minutes at a time.  What happened to you?”

Malfoy tried to brush the dust out of his hair.  “I was in the _wall_ , you idiot - if I had known - Potter what the hell have you done?”

“I told you, it wasn’t me - the potion -“

_“Potter why are you me?”_

Harry opened his mouth for a moment, then shut it. It had been very dark in wardrobe #6.  “I - fuck. I needed a hair. I thought it was one of your father’s, but - I was in a hurry."

Oh, God.  This was awkward. And unhelpful - one Malfoy snooping around was suspicious, but surely two of him would be worse?

“You could transform back into an elf,” Harry suggested. “Say you’ve been told to take me… where do you have left on your map?”

“Don’t you think the fact that you’re not, oh I don’t know - _tragically injured_ \- might raise questions?”

Harry shrugged his shoulders. “You could make me a wheelchair - you’re brilliant with transfiguration, right? Like that thing you did with the leaves. Anyway, I think this might actually work better than doing a random search. If I’m _you_ , can’t I just ask someone where she’s at? If we ask the right person, I mean. If it doesn’t work we’ll find a way out.”

There was a pause. "That may not be the stupidest thing you've ever said, Potter."  
  
"Don't try to flatter me, arsehole, just make me a fucking chair."  
  
I no time they were rolling down a long, wood-paneled corridor. Harry was draped in blankets, and Malfoy was pushing him along in search of the East Wing library, number 5 on Malfoy's list of most likely holding areas for his mother. The East Wing bedroom windows opened onto a closed patio rather than the Manor grounds, making them harder to escape from and easier to ward.  
  
Harry was starting to overheat under his pile of blankets and pulled his arms inside to try and loosen the clasp on the cloak he was wearing. Once it was off he felt a bit better. It occurred to him for the first time that it might be a little awkward for Malfoy to have someone else right there, wearing his body, adjusting the fit around his collar. He bit his lip and slipped a hand under his shirt, running his hand along the warm, smooth expanse of Malfoy's stomach and then realizing that he was starting to get aroused.  Probably this made him a terrible person. He put his hands where everyone could see them.

  
They turned a corner, and Fenrir Greyback was standing at the end of the hall. Malfoy drew in a sharp breath, grabbed the arm of Harry's chair, and tried not to move. Harry met the werewolf's eyes. He'd been doing impressions of Malfoy for years. He could do this. "I beg your pardon,” he drawled, searching his soul for the right combination of courtesy and boredom. "We - I was looking for Mother, you know. Bid her farewell. She knows something she's not telling us, and Father thought that I might be able to persuade her. Unfortunately he was called away before he could take me to her."  
  
Fenrir's eyes glittered. "Was he now.” It didn't feel like a question.  
  
Harry swallowed and raised his chin. "I can get her to talk. I know what women like her want to hear.”

The werewolf cocked his head to one side and smiled - a gesture that Harry suddenly understood, in a stark and visceral way, meant something very different between animals than it did between people. Harry held his gaze and refused to give any ground. He gripped his wand under the stifling heap of blankets, counted to 50, and reminded himself that he’d been face to face with Voldemort. He wanted to get away and find someone else, but he had a feeling that now that Fenrir Greyback had them in his sights, running would only provoke a chase. He needed something to negotiate with.

“She’ll be useless to us soon, I suppose. Unless… unless someone _else_ can find something to do with her. Don't want all our nice things going to waste, do we?”

Fenrir licked his lips.  “Right you are,” he growled, and led them through a side door that took them outside into an elaborate Japanese garden and a slowly darkening sky.

*******

Harry gripped his wand and waited. There was, of course, a small chance that Fenrir was actually leading them to where Narcissa Malfoy was being held. He might also be leading them to a dark patch of forest where he would turn then loose and hunt them for sport, which seemed more likely at the moment, but Malfoy turned around - his long, leathery ears pricking up at every sudden night sound - and looked at Harry like he was counting on him to save them both. They had no other leads, so they walked.  
  
Fenrir led them past a long row of stables where Harry could hear soft grunts and heavy feet pawing at the ground. The path was dirt here, but it had been pounded down to make it more suitable for horses' hooves and the wheels of Harry's chair rolled over it without kicking up a lot of dust. They passed through the yard of a ruined barn, not rotting but burned out, ash lying in drifts like unseasonably early snow.  Harry thought he could smell charcoal in the air and wondered how long ago the building had been razed.  
  
Past a grove of Aspen trees, stark white against the hard red light of sundown, they marched on and on in terrible silence while Harry tried to think of a way to escape. But then they crested a hill, and laid out before them was a cemetery. The Malfoy family's private burial plot. Fenrir Greyback turned on him with a wicked smile, and Harry realized that this was probably where he was going to die.  
  
The werewolf leapt at Harry, teeth just catching the shoulder of his cloak as Harry rolled out of the chair and came up with his wand at the ready. " _Incendio,"_ he shouted, and the tree at Fenrir's back erupted in crackling flames. A nasty hex sprang from Malfoy's wand, wordless and bright, and hit the werewolf squarely in the chest, causing him to stumble and fall backward. It was two against one, but Malfoy's wand movements were clumsy in his present form and often seemed to miss the mark. Struggling to get his blankets off, Harry was an easy target. The werewolf caught him with a swiftly hissed _Impedimenta_ , cutting him off the knees with astonishing force so that he pitched forward and cracked his chin when he hit the ground. Before Harry could catch his breath, Fenrir followed this up with a body bind, leaving him trapped and helpless as he leveled blow after blow at Malfoy's tiny body. Harry was helpless. Malfoy aimed a stinging hex right at Fenrir's eyes and the monster let out a hungry, gutteral wail. But winning a real duel does not depend on who’s made or given up the most points, and as Malfoy was hurrying over to check on Harry, Fenrir leapt up and pinned Malfoy to the ground with one hand, glittering with thick yellow fingernails cut down to resemble claws. He was still a man for the most part, but Harry could see how he must hate it. He could see how the creature longed to be free.  
  
"Shhhh," the man hissed, licking his lips as he took both of their wands and stuck them in his belt. "Relax. Nothing to be afraid of." He dragged Malfoy down a flight of white stairs, into the mouth of an enormous family mausoleum, and Harry lay on his side helplessly. All he could do was listen, heart pounding almost out of his chest, for the sounds of Malfoy being torn to pieces. His chest ached. Malfoy had been stupid to put his faith in Harry, to think that they could walk into the enemy's fortress and take what they wanted and leave. Now Malfoy was going to die, and all Harry could do was lie still and take it.  

After a few minutes the werewolf returned and began pulling Harry down the steps and into the dark. It was a relief, actually, when he dragged him into a solid stone room and removed his wand from his useless hand. He snapped both wands in half, eyes shining, shaking his head. “If I could have my way with you…” He clucked his tongue sadly. “Alas. I have had orders from above. The Dark Lord would like to spend some time with you in the morning - especially you, my little pup - once that potion's worn off.”  
  
The boys didn't answer. Fenrir seemed unimpressed.  
  
"Secrets and secrets. That's all right. The Dark Lord wishes to explore all eventualities, but I've seen what's inside of a man and it's nothing but meat and entrails. Keep your secrets if you like. In the morning, when they question you, remember that you still belong to me. I've caught you, and I'll have you when all of this is over."  
  
Almost as an afterthought he cast a spell that revealed the jewelry they both carried - brooch and ring, the portkeys they had brought along for their ultimate escape - as well the two portkeys Hermione had given them. Then he sealed the door behind him, leaving them alone in fear and darkness.

*******

After about an hour of lying there on the ground, frozen and immobilized, they found they were able to move. They spent half an hour looking for exits, but without their wands there was very little they could do. By mutual agreement they shuffled over to the far end of the room, where a small, heavily-barred window revealed a pale square of moonlight. Malfoy was himself again, much to Harry's relief. Harry reached up and touched his own hair, but it was still smooth and silky, his hands still slender in the quiet glow.

"What the fuck are you doing here, Potter?" Malfoy asked. "Why did you come with me on this pointless, stupid errand?"  
  
Harry frowned. "You _asked_ me to."  
  
"Do you _hear_ yourself when you talk? That's not an answer, that's - we've hated one another since we were eleven.  I'd have taken help from literally anyone, bribed or stolen, anything, but _you_ \- why do you care what happens to me?"  
  
Harry wanted to scold him for being so stupid, but it occurred to him that he didn't exactly know why he'd thought this was a good idea. Malfoy was right - they had never been friends. "I don't remember my mum and dad," he offered. "It just didn't seem _fair_. It seemed wrong for them to use her like that. To use the one person you love to hurt you. You were unhappy."

Malfoy rolled his eyes. "What does my being happy have to do with anything? Happy isn't the _point_ , Merlin! People would have died if I'd done what I was planning to do. You should have turned me in when you saw the mark and washed your hands of me.  I’m unhappy because I _should be_ unhappy, you moron, because I’m a coward and a liar and I hurt people when I was told to. Some people deserve to suffer, Potter."  
  
Harry looked angry for a moment, and then he swallowed. "All right then, some people. Not you."  
  
Malfoy let out an exasperated sigh. “Fuck's sake, there's no reasoning with you.” He turned his head and looked away, shoulders hunched, examining his hands.

Harry felt heat rising in his chest. He wasn't an idiot. “I mean, I wish you weren't so _destructive_. Well…” God this was embarrassing, “self-destructive. I mean, bloody hell, Malfoy, just,” he said, grabbing Malfoy’s wrist and pushing his sleeve up until the entire length of his Dark Mark was on display - “ _this_. I mean _look_ at this! Why do you let other people lead you around like you’re on leash?” Malfoy’s face darkened. “We both know how much you hate him. How much you’ve hated him from the beginning. Why would you let someone do this to you?”

Malfoy snatched his arm back, but he didn’t pull the sleeve back into place - just looked at it, his face crumpling into an agonized expression, while he just… shrugged. Like it was nothing to do with him. “At the time it didn’t seem like it would make any difference. They _had_ me, Potter. They'd turned my home into a prison and I couldn’t walk the grounds, couldn’t visit the library. The fucking birds all fled, Potter - two hundred years of breeding and my mother's fancy pigeons just _disappeared_ one night. I woke up once and found that someone was just sitting in the corner of my room, _breathing_ , and I didn’t know if they were there to kill me or keep watch over me or _pet my hair in my sleep_ , and it didn’t matter because there was nothing I could do about it.”

Harry didn't know what to say to that, but Malfoy went on without him. “I thought it might… fuck. Like it might put me on equal footing with the rest of them. Like they would look at me differently. Anyway, you shouldn’t be here,” Malfoy said, and got up to go stand with his back against the wall a few feet away.

After a minute or so spent in silence Harry joined him, back to the wall, rubbing his arms to ward off the cold. “I’m sorry. I wasn't being fair. Sometimes all the choices are bad, and so you just sort of… do what's in front of you.”

“Shut your eyes and think of England?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“But not you.”

“I - not me what?”

“The _grammar_ on you, sometimes, Potter, I swear to God. _You_ wouldn’t have taken the easy way, is what I'm saying. You can make all the excuses for me you like, but we both know what I am.”

Harry wanted to shake him until he saw sense, or hit him, anything, but instead he leaned against the wall and pressed his arm flush agains Malfoy's, taking in his warmth. “I think maybe it's different for me,” he admitted. “There’s something wrong with me where I can’t imagine the consequences of my actions early enough to stop myself _doing_ the thing. Whatever thing pops into my head. I mean, not just _anything_ , but whatever I think is right. Ron says I'm brave, but I think most of the time it's just poor planning.”

“Don’t try that rubbish with me, Potter, trying to sidestep all that fucking _decency_ and _nobility_ of yours to try and cheer me up.”

Harry smiled in the dark, letting his hand casually brush against Malfoy's. "It could have been worse, you know. You could've gotten one of those tramp stamps, and we all know what sort of message that sends.”

Malfoy turned to him and laughed, and when the light hit his face like that Harry could swear that he looked almost… _affectionate_. Harry blushed, feeling the heat rise in his neck and shoulders, and was grateful that his face was partly hidden shadow. It was like he was being swept downhill toward a cliff, trying to grab hold of anything he could hold before it was too late.

"Potter, there is something not at all right with you." The _way_ he said it was almost too much. What was wrong with Harry? But when he glanced up again Malfoy was looking at him, awestruck. Malfoy bit his lower lip, worrying it between his teeth. "Your eyes are green."  
  
"Oh. Yeah?" said Harry, hearing the hitch in his own voice.

"The potion's wearing off. You're almost Harry again." Malfoy sounded relieved, like he'd been waiting and waiting, and so Harry leaned in and kissed him. Malfoy whimpered softly, opening his mouth to let his tongue slide just a little way between Harry's lips, and Harry's stomach melted into a pool of soft liquid heat.

"Do you really think we’re going to die?" Harry whispered when they moved apart for a moment.  
  
Malfoy opened his eyes slowly, as though confused. He looked as if he was trying to think of the best way to break it to Harry, but instead he just nodded. "Once they're done with us." Harry seemed to consider this, and found that instead of being frightened, his whole body felt lighter. This was how it ended. Now he knew. "All right then," he said, and closed the gap between them once again to press a slow, lazy kiss to Malfoy's lips, his fingers curling into the that soft, silky hair, inching their bodies closer together until he could feel the other boy pressed tightly against him. Malfoy – of did you have to call someone by their first name once they’d had their tongue in your mouth? _Draco_ , then, and he thrilled with the feeling of his name on his lips, and whispered it inaudibly into the kiss. Draco's mouth opened to him eagerly, and the sound of his own name, barely articulated into the cold air, seemed to excite him tremendously. He deepened the kiss, arms dropping to grab onto Harry's waist and pull him in closer. Draco's mouth was unbelievably slick and wonderful, sweetness layered over the bitter aftertaste of potions residue. Harry's body thrilled with the nearness of him, the hard muscles of Draco's thighs pressed up against his own, the smell of pine and sweat and soap that lingered on his skin; the sharp contrast between the cold, unyielding wall and the heat of Draco's mouth.

If they were going to die in a few hours, Harry wasn't going to spend that time sleeping.

  
Draco's fingers dug into Harry's hips. He twisted, pulling Harry's body flush against his own again until - there, oh, _God_ , Malfoy was hard, rocking against Harry's thigh and letting out soft moans. A shock of arousal raced up and down Harry's spine. His breath was coming fast now, and he bent his knees, adjusting his hips until he could slide his own almost painful erection against the bulge in Malfoy's pants, and it was better than the best fucking thing he'd ever felt before. "Fuck, Potter," Draco gasped, gripping him harder and trying desperately to speed up.

Harry had kissed a few girls before. He'd daydreamed about kissing boys, but he hadn't been prepared for the overwhelming intensity of having Draco Malfoy pinned to a wall and giving it to him like he would die if he had to stop. Draco kissed him hungrily, and then he did something unexpected and _brilliant_ with his hips and Harry forgot how to breathe.  He reached down and tugged Draco’s shirttails out of his trousers, nervous fingers slipping underneath the fabric to find acres of hot skin, every inch of it as smooth and delicious as he had imagined. Draco breathed in sharply at the contact, but after a moment it seemed to make him braver. He grabbed the hem of Harry's jumper then and tugged, yanking it over Harry’s head enthusiastically.  “Hey!” said Harry, rubbing his left ear.

“Sorry,” Draco said, leaning in to press a kiss to Harry's neck. Harry brushed his lips against Malfoy's jaw. "Shhh," he said, and reached down to cup the length of Malfoy's erection with his hand, pressing until the other boy hissed and shuddered. "Is this all right?" he asked, and Malfoy nodded, pressing himself against Harry's hand. "Please, _God_ yes," he said softly, pleading. So Harry undid the top button of Malfoy's trousers. "Potter, _please_."

"Please _what_?"

"Don't make me _say it_ " Draco growled, irritated and rutting shamelessly against Harry's open hand. It was almost unbearable to watch him like this. Harry thought he might burst into flames. He pressed his nose into the curve of Draco's neck, though, stopping to pull his earlobe into his mouth for a few seconds before he whispered into Draco's ear, "All right, but you have to say, _please,_ _Harry_. If you want my hands down your pants then it's first names only _._ ”

“Oh my _God,”_ Draco whined, sliding his hands down to cup Harry's arse and grinding hard against him, the hot length of his erection sliding firmly across Harry's own and making both of them gasp. " _Please_ , Harry," he said, and Harry was on him.

Harry had never really thought this far ahead. He had fantasized about sex often enough, always vaguely and without much purpose beyond getting himself off. He fantasized about a handful of girls as well as boys, all of them narrow-hipped and sarcastic and generally dressed in Quidditch leathers, which made him wonder exactly how formative an experience it had been meeting Oliver Wood.

But here was Draco, that wicked mouth moving hungrily over Harry's own as they ground against one another in a freezing, dark mausoleum. Just the _heat_ of him was so intense that Harry had to take a step back, gulping down air and trying to regain his equilibrium.

“Shit, I - was that too much?” asked Draco.  “I'm sorry, I don’t know - I'm not sure what this is.”

Harry leaned his weight against Draco again, panting slightly, and smoothed one hand over Draco's stomach, trying to reassure him.  “No, just - you’re so warm. Just trying to get my bearings.” He tucked one hand down the back of Draco’s trousers, humming as he kneaded the smooth, firm muscle of Draco's arse. “Sorry if this seems a bit fast,” Harry breathed, dropping to his knees and rubbing his mouth over the thin, silk fabric of Draco's pants. Draco let out an embarrassing sound as Harry nuzzled him softly, kissing and licking the fabric until it was almost soaked through. Draco's knees were shaking.

Harry yanked Draco's pants down, and Draco gasped, pressing warm, open-mouthed kisses against his skin. He hadn’t had a plan before they started, but one was forming now, and it involved finding out exactly what noises Draco made when he got a bit too excited.

Much to Harry’s delight, it appeared to involve a great deal of swearing. “Bloody hell, Ohh, _yesyesyes._ Merlin bloody _fuck_." He pushed Harry away but held him in place with one hand. "Are you trying to kill me, Potter?”

"That’s _Harry_ ,” he corrected. Draco laughed and ran his fingers through Harry's wild black hair, tugging impatiently.  “All right _Harry_ ,” he agreed, and that was the last thing he said for quite some time.


	4. Chapter 4

They slept badly and woke before dawn. They had no way to tell what time it was, but the window had nothing to offer them but moonlight.

The song was hard to pick out at first. It could have been birdsong, but it grew complicated, shifting into a scale that Harry didn't recognize, and as he fought it way out of sleep he realized that it was a person singing - in French, or possibly Portuguese. He couldn't tell the difference.

Harry shook Draco awake, pressing his lips lightly to his ear and sitting up to listen. Draco groaned, and stilled, and swore.

 _"Tu raccourcis reines et rois_ ," he shouted, getting to his feet as the song stopped. After a pause came the answer: _"Par ton influence divine... Nous avon..."_

" _Reconquis nos droits!_ " This last line was sung in unison.    
  
"Mother, can you hear me?" A voice seemed to slip through the cracks in the wall, as though it had been traveling through pipes or underground tunnels to reach them. "Darling. Are you all right?"  
  
"Where are you?" Harry paced frantically along the wall just beside the doorway, trying to discover where her voice was coming from. "Can you come get us?"

"Who is that with you, dear?" called Mrs. Malfoy. "A friend from school?"

Draco sighed. "It's just - Harrry Potter," he said.

There was a pause - just a little longer than normal. "I see. I'm so pleased my son has a friend he can rely on. Now I don't want to alarm you, dear," she said, "I know how you worry - but I seem to be tied up inside a small room. The architecture looks about twefth century, so I presume I am somewhere above ground - most likely in one of the ceremonial chambers."

Draco's voice wavered. "I'm so sorry, Mother. I'm should have come sooner."  


"Not at all, Draco - this is fine," she said. "You're here now."  
  
"You don't understand, we're _trapped_. They have our wands. There's nothing we can do." Harry wanted to put his arms around Draco's waist, but settled for standing close enough to let their arms brush against one another. They'd managed to distract themselves the night before, but now, he realized, they were actually going to die. He didn't know if it made things better or worse for Draco that he got to speak to his mother once more before it happened.  
  
Narcissa's voice came back slow and heavy with sarcasm. "No wands?” she chided. “As if you would _need_ a wand, in this of all places. Think about where you are standing, Draco. Don't tell me that you need a _key_ to open a door.”

Draco grasped Harry's hand in the near-dark, squeezing it tightly and whispering. "Oh, Christ - I think she's right."

" _Don't think I didn't hear that, young man_."

"Sorry!"

"Draco, what's she talking about?"

Draco stood up straighter and leaned into Harry's arm, warm and reassuring. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his Weasley sweater.  "Right," he said with undisguised enthusiasm. "I'll need something sharp."

"What is it? Draco, come on, tell me how to help! How do we get out of here?"

"You can shut up and look for glass or wire or a nail somewhere on the floor. Look, I'll start on this side of the room and you start over there. All right?" He turned away and started digging around in the dark corners of the mausoleum on his hands and knees.  
  
"Yes, but what _for_?" Harry asked, patiently scouring the floor

"I need to be able to break skin, and do it as _precisely as possible_. We're doing blood magic."

Harry felt a thrill slip down his back, tracing his spine, pooling somewhere around the vicinity of his tailbone. Blood magic was generally frowned on by modern witches and wizards - and not just because it was so difficult to control. “I hope you don’t I expect me to be your virgin sacrifice,” Harry called, telling himself in no uncertain terms that this was a joke. Harry was very funny sometimes, he told himself. Draco swore as he knocked his shin against something hard and pointy. It felt like they were running out of time.

  
“Could you possibly just reassure me,” said Harry, his voice a little higher than he’d meant for it to be, “that you are not planning to murder me?”

Suddenly Draco was right there at Harry's back, breathing against his neck, pressing his smile into Harry's shoulder and smoothing a hand over his stomach. Harry jumped and laughed anxiously. "Don't be an idiot,” Draco whispered. “All that common, plebian blood is no use to me.”

The word “mudblood” flitted across Harry’s consciousness, and he was about to say something nasty in return when Draco sighed loudly, apparently having just realized what he had said. “Not like _that_ , Potter, for Christ’s sake. I was _joking_ , anyway. Blood magic gets a bad name, but if you'd spent any time reading about wizarding history you would realize most of it has to do with property rights.”

"I - what?"

Draco almost sounded amused. "Look, Potter - Harry, I mean _-“_ he said, and the name alone was reassuring, “- I don't know if you can fully _appreciate_ the level of incest has been required to maintain wizarding bloodlines over the past twelve centuries or so, but I assure you that it is much, much worse than you imagine. The fact is that I am a direct descendant of the first legal proprietors of this estate through three of my four grandparents, and the only legal heir through two if them. This building we are standing in - or its foundations, at any rate, it's been rebuilt so many times I doubt that any of the original walls are still standing - the foundations were laid down before the Roman occupation. They built it from stones quarried in _my_ bloody hills, Harry - built the beams from the trees in my forest, mortared it with clay from my river _;_ burned the bodies of their revered dead here for 300 years before Christian burial became fashionable among wizards. I have unequivocal and consummate rights in this place, and I am telling you that the doors will open _when I bloody well say so._ "

*******

"Wait!" said Harry, feeling stupid. He found the oversized cloak on the floor where they'd slept and fished around in the pockets.''

"Bottle," he said breathlessly. Draco took it from his hand and smashed it on the floor, carefully selecting one of the larger pieces from the floor and holding his arm up to the patch of faint light that was just beginning to come through the heavily-barred window.

Draco carefully unbuttoned his shirt and threw it over his shoulder. He would need something to staunch the bleeding later. White-blonde hair stuck out at odd angles and his pale, narrow shoulders tensed beautifully as he tried to gather his courage. With a sharp intake of breath, Draco cut one deep, clear line into the palm of his left hand. Then a smaller line. The another, another, another. Drops of blood rose to the surface and begin flowing downward to join one another at his wrist. Harry flinched with every cut, but he placed a hand on Draco's back and leaned over his shoulder to watch.

In the center of his palm, Draco had carved a seven-sided star. His breath was coming out in gasps now, but he did not slow down or hesitate.  He cut a series of sharp-looking runes into each of his slender white fingers, hissing with the pain. Harry thought that something looked a little off about them, but runes were really more Hermione’s thing and Harry couldn’t quite figure out what the problem was. He wanted to put his arms around Draco's waist and hold him tightly, to whisper words of comfort or encouragement, but he didn’t know if that was allowed or even wanted right now. Maybe they should have spent a few more minutes talking last night, instead of just... Right.

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

Draco’s hands shook.  “Nearly finished,” he said, and Harry could hear the strain in his voice. After another minute Draco got to his feet, smearing blood on the wall where he reached to steady himself. A slow trickle of blood was running down his wrist and dripping onto the floor. He sounded out of breath, but a smile played at the corner of his lips, like he knew he had just done something immensely clever.

"There," he said, wiping the blood off of his palm. "Let's see if I'm a wizard." He pressed his hand firmly to the center of the door and then pulled back, leaving an imprint of the runes - like a wood cut, Harry realized suddenly. That was was why the runes had looked off - they'd been backward, mirror images of themselves, so that the imprint would come out looking right. The lines were slightly blurred, but Harry could sense magic layered across the surface of the door now, sharp-edged and wild, and different from what they used to seeing at school.

"Alohamora," he said. And just like that, then the door swung open.

In the corridor they could see the early morning light spilling onto the floor a row of through high-set windows. Glancing back, Harry was finally able to see the room they had spent the night in, and shuddered. There, at the other end of the room, a slate-grey oven stretched from floor to ceiling, every surface around it blackened with smoke. Harry looked down and realized he was covered in soot. Or, if he was going to be morbid about it, in the ashes of the people who had been cremated here.

His first time fooling around with a boy had been in a crematorium.

" _Please - please don't say it_ , Potter, I'm not sure if I can deal with it right now so just come the fuck on." Harry grabbed Draco’s hand a pressed a kiss to his left wrist, feeling the crackle of wild magic still dancing across the surface of his skin. If they made it out of this alive, Harry decided, he would get things right. He would make Draco happy. He would make him fucking _pancakes_.

The song became a call-and response.

"Soutiens les lois de la patrie," called Draco. His mother answered from the corridor to their left: "Et que ton superbe instrument..." They followed it.

"Devienne toujours permanent, pour détruire une secte impie," sang Draco, and then listened. It came from very near them, but it was muffled, as though it was coming through several walls instead of one - "Aiguise ton rasoir pour Pitt et ses agents."

"Here? Is it here?" Draco shouted, smacking the wall where they had heard her voice.

"Well done, sweetheart. I think it may one of the hidden rooms, but that shouldn't be any trouble for you."

"Yes!" he said, bringing his hand up to the wall and leaving another bloody imprint - sharper now because the blood was beginning to slow. “ _Finestra_ ,” he said - and the wall fell away, opening up a large, round window to the other side where his mother could clearly be seen, tied to a pillar.

"My goodness, you're _filthy_ dear," she said when she saw him, and he threw his arms around her, kissing her on the forehead. "And Harry Potter. You know I wasn't quite sure whether to believe you, but here you are." Harry waved hello awkwardly, tongue tied, and set about untying her hands and feet.

Narcissa Malfoy did not look herself. Her hands, for one thing, were dirty. Someone had cut her hair very short and unevenly, and she reached up once her hands were free to smooth it down. She was wearing a plain set of black robes streaked with something that looked like ashes. There were scratches all along her throat and across one side of her face. Draco pulled her to him, petting her hair softly. It was a quiet thing - no sobbing, no declarations of love passed between them, but Harry still felt as though he were intruding.

“Draco," he whispered. "Someone is coming.”

There was the sound of feet on flagstones. “I’m so sorry, Mother,” Draco said.

“Nonsense. You’ve both done splendidly.”

“We could always throw rocks at them,” Harry suggested.

For the second time in four hours, Harry wondered if he was about to die. They were still without their wands. “Draco, what sorts of spells can you do right now, with that mark on your hand?”

Draco shook his head, grimacing. “I'm not really sure. Nothing offensive, I'd guess. It’s asking a lot of this place just to open a few doors or windows, and I don’t know if I'm… _physically_ strong enough to do anything else. Most of the magic in this building is just here to keep the roof and the walls from falling down. ”

There was a pause, and Draco looked at his mother, his lips parting in surprise.  “You don’t suppose?” he asked, and his mother patted his cheek. “I'm sure you can do anything you set your mind to, dear.”

Draco crouched down on the floor, glancing up at the walls and ceiling before placing his hand in the stone floor beneath them, pressing downward to focus his energy into the building's foundations.

“Oh,” said Harry, rather impressed. “Could that actually work? I mean, couldn’t we just end up killing ourselves in the process?”

“That is certainly possible,” Narcissa said crisply, looking every part the lady in spite of the blood that Draco had left on her hair and a bruise across her forehead. The footsteps were much louder now.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter.’ Harry knelt down and placed his hand over Draco's, willing his magic into the ground beneath him. He felt something stir, but he didn’t know if it would do any good.

Draco pressed his palm firmly into the layer of dirt that lay upon the flagstones. He started the incantation. At the far end of the hallway three wizards appeared with the werewolf at the lead, looking furious. The moment they caught sight of Draco, curses started to fly, most bouncing off the walls of the narrow hallway or fizzling out before they reached the small stone entrance. 

But all at once the floor was shuddering beneath their feet, huge stones knocked loose and crashing to the ground, ceilings dropping the collected weight of centuries in a dusty heap on the floor, and still Draco’s mouth hadn’t stopped moving. Still naked from the waist up, lean muscles stretched tight under skin that glowed bright white and pink in the morning sunshine, his whole torso streaked with blood and soot. He was sweating from the exertion. His silvery blonde hair hung around his face in messy locks; a sort of heat or electricity seemed to radiate off of him, as he willed his magic straight into the ground until his fingers went white from the pressure. He didn't look like a wizard, Harry thought. This was something older and stranger than any magic he’d seen before - sorcery, maybe. Or religion.

Screams erupted in the hallway as the floor fell out from beneath their assailants. Someone threw a blasting curse in their direction through the mass of falling stone, but it missed them, opening up a wall behind them that led directly to the gardens. One of the Death Eaters still stood on the other side of the wreckage - Harry didn't recognize her - but she had dropped her wand. Hope flickered into life again.

“Go!” Harry shouted over the noise, urging Narcissa toward the ruined wall and the possibility of freedom. He turned to help Draco stand, and found him lying on his face, seizing violently, his legs jerking helplessly against the floor.

“No no no no no!” Harry cried, dropping to his knees and grabbing Draco under his armpits so that he could drag him onto his lap.  “Come on, come on, be fine. _You’re_ _fine_.” He didn’t want to hurt Draco, but he knew that it was definitely safer outside the building than inside, so he grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him backward as fast as he could manage until they made it to the breach in the wall. There was so much debris that he and Narcissa had to carry Draco bodily out of the building, dodging small rocks and flying masonry while he kixked and shuddered involuntarily until they were finally in the clear.

They lay Draco  down in the grass, his body going limp, and Harry felt a sudden need to check his pulse. His eyes blinked open slowly, revealing an ugly yellow tint around his irises that hadn’t been there the day before. Narcissa knelt on the grass and smoothed back the damp hair sticking to his forehead to get a better look. “His liver is failing?” 

Harry swallowed, nodded. “It's one of the side effects. Hermione told us what to look for.”

“We have to go,” he told Draco, and got him to his feet as well as he could manage.

All around them something flashed, like lightning in a bowl, followed by a thunderous screech like metal being twisted and scraped against metal; like a train driving full speed into a wall. "Bloody hell" said Harry, and turned to see what had happened. Everything looked exactly as it had before.

"Someone's broken through the wards," said Narcissa, an edge of anxiety in her voice. "The house won't be pleased."

There was a crack and a fizzle of magic, and Professor McGonagall was standing in a field a hundred feet away from them. She turned and caught sight of them, pulling her robes up around her ankles and running toward them. "Professor," Harry called, so relieved that he thought he like crying. "What are you doing here?"

"I will forever be appalled by your lack of judgment in this matter, Harry," she said, and hugged the three of them at once. "Miss Granger apprised us of the situation a few hours after you'd gone. I cannot believe that you would put yourselves in danger - "

"I talked him into it," Draco whimpered. "'s not his fault... he's an idiot."

"Be that as it may, Mr. Malfoy -"

"Forgive me," Narcissa interrupted, "but my son needs a Healer. Perhaps you can reprimand him after he returns to school."

There were explosions going on closer to the house, and Harry wondere how much time they had before there were Death Eaters on the lawn.

"Yes," she said, her eyes widening as she took in Draco's appearance. "I beg your pardon. You should be able to Apparate now, the wards have been lowered all over the grounds."

Narcissa stood up a little straighter. "We've all been disarmed, I'm afraid." McGonagall frowned. "But there is a gardener's shed a little way down the trail here with a working floo. I think we can manage, if you will stay here until we clear the trees and hold off any attackers."

"Certainly," said Professor McGonagall. And I should be able to so something now. She twirled her wand around Draco's head, and the color in his cheeks changed from yellow to pink. "That's the best I can do for the moment," she said, and Draco mumbled his thanks. "Now go on."

Harry and Narcissa placed an arm under each of his shoulders, and together they limped as quickly as they could to meet the forest's edge.

After a few minutes they half-carried, half-dragged Draco into the shadow of the silent wood. Narcissa was trying to support her son's weight, but it was slow going and Draco's whinging and drooping and sharp elbows made the whole thing more or less impossible.

“Wait,” said Harry, leaning Draco up against a tree and stopping to catch his breath.

“You,” he panted, his hands coming up to sweep the hair out of Draco's eyes, “are so, _fucking_ ,” he said, tucking his arms under Draco's knees and shoulders and picking him up - " _heavy_."

Draco squealed in protest but Harry held him tight, nestling Draco's head against his own chest, and kissed him on the forehead. Right in front of his mother. That would shut him up for a few minutes at least.

Harry groaned and panted under the weight of Draco's floppy (but irritatingly perfect) body. “If you _don’t_ die," said Harry, "can I take you to the movies some time?”  
  
Draco looked over at his mother and then up at Harry, blushing furiously and looking as though he was trying very hard to formulate a coherent, thoughtful reply. “Mmm?” he said.  
  
Harry nuzzled his cheek softly. “It’s a sort of a Muggle thing. Like a play, except - ”  
  
“Shut - yes. I’m… am familiar with _the cinema_. Idiot,” Draco drawled at him. He looked rather flummoxed.  “Like a _date?_ ” he whispered.

Harry laughed and willed himself to keep walking. "Yeah, sort of," he said. Narcissa had picked up her pace a bit and was now a little way ahead of them, keeping her eyes steadfastly on the path.

“Oh,” said Draco softly. “Y' want to?”

Harry huffed at him. “I mean I've just asked you, so, yeah. If you want. I thought - last night...” he trailed off, worried for a moment that he had gotten something wrong.

Draco blushed furiously, avoiding his gaze. “I didn't think - I mean I thought, last night, y’know…” he said, "that maybe it was just... because we were about to die." He grinned a lopsided grin, but still wouldn't look Harry in the eye. “Like maybe you just didn't want to die, you know. As a _virgin_.”

“No,” Harry said, hugging Draco more tightly to his chest. “No. I'd been thinking about it - about you - but everything seemed a bit hectic, and I wasn’t sure if you felt that way about _me_ , and then we were alone without our wands and I thought, well. The worst he can do is punch me in the face.”

Draco made a pleased sound, low in his throat. "I'd already punched you in the face yesterday. I'd gotten it out of my system."

"And anyway, I'm pretty sure that I _am_ still a virgin," Harry whispered, "in spite of - what are the rules when it comes to boys? Do hand jobs count?"

Narcissa coughed sharply from the path ahead, and both of them looked up, horrified. “Courtship, Mr. Potter” Narcissa called over her shoulder without an ounce of awkwardness, “traditionally begins with a series of small gifts exchanged by members of the respective parties’ extended families. That may pose some challenges for you, I know, but I’m sure I know of someone who could advise you if you wish. I'll give you their address when we get to the hospital.”

Draco groaned and buried his head in Harry's chest, the blush creeping all the way up to his ears, but Harry just smiled and carried on.


End file.
